Sales

lead generation machine

How to Turn Your Website Into a Lead Generation Machine

Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Sales, Warm Leads /

Do you ever feel like your website is underperforming? Do you wish that your online presence could bring more customers and revenue to your business? If so, then this blog post is for you! We’re going to share with you the secrets behind turning any website into a lead-generation machine.

Keep reading, or use the links below to learn about effective strategies on how to optimize your website and make it an unstoppable force in generating leads.

Getting Started

The first thing to turn your website into a lead generation machine is to install a lead pixel. A web designer, developer, or agency can put the pixel on your site within an hour or less. With a pixel, you can collect visitor and website activity data and customer touchpoints.   

Data about website visitors and their experience on your website is important. If you notice a high bounce rate or the wrong people coming to your site, something is wrong. You’ll need to find out where the problem lies and make the necessary changes. 

For lead generation, your website needs to be customer-centric. It should offer the specific information your ideal customer is looking for. Focusing on meeting the needs of your site visitors builds your credibility and boosts lead generation. 

Score to Gauge

Source

Succeed With a Plan

Some companies don’t think about lead generation until after their website is up and running. They don’t see their website as a lead generation tool. Plan to keep the generation of new business front and center.

Getting a new business website up and running is a labor of love, among other things. When lead generation is not a priority, all your hard work may be for naught. 

The first step with your website is to measure what is currently happening, even if it isn’t good. When you first put up a new site, track who is and who isn’t visiting. 

Plan Ahead – How Will You Reverse Engineer Leads

Planning ahead avoids incorporating a lead capture, or touchpoint, into an existing site. Already having these lead captures on your site will better your lead generation efforts. Ask yourself the following questions to guide the building and designing of your website:  

  • How do you want to capture leads?
  • What types of leads do you want? 
  • What do you want to know about the leads?
  • How do you want to manage this information?

After identifying who you want to attract and the information you need, think of customer touchpoints. Where could you place a point of contact or interaction?  

What does this look like? Let’s say you’re a SaaS company. You may use a variety of touchpoints like free trials, sign-up forms, and a demo contact form to collect leads.

Customer Touch Points Examples

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Improving Your Website

Launching a new site is an exciting project that involves the expertise of many people or teams.  It requires significant communication, planning, coordination, and teamwork.

For these reasons, the website launch process usually takes longer than expected. If you launch your site on schedule, it won’t bring a surge in traffic or leads right away.

It takes time before the search engines pick up the new site and index the content and pages. Paid traffic through search engine marketing (SEM) and paid advertising on Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn can help.

Many successful organizations have a healthy mix of organic and paid traffic. A quality ad campaign has dedicated landing pages to optimize the conversion of visitors. 

You will need to ask your team to iterate these pages after analysis and more time. After the initial site set up, here are other ways to improve your website to generate more leads: 

Invest in a Quality About Us Page and Include Testimonials

Today, every business has a website, including your competitors. To generate quality leads, your website visitors must know who you are and that you are legit and trustworthy. A quality about us page and customer testimonials will tell who you are and establish your credibility. 

Make sure the about us page and the testimonial pages are easy to find. It is a good idea to include any awards or certifications your company and employees have received. This will further add to your business’ credibility which will generate more, higher-quality leads. 

Example of Testimonial

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Make Contacting You a Breeze

Customers who are about to make a purchasing decision will have questions and concerns. Make sure it is easy for your website visitors to contact you should they like more information.

Include a ‘contact us’ tab in your homepage’s navigation menu. Also, include your contact information on the bottom of your homepage and in your sitemap. You can also list your contact details throughout your website in your CTAs (call to actions).

Have Simple Contact Forms

Besides making it easy for website visitors to contact you, ensure that your contact form is easy to complete. Contact forms are an effective way to generate leads as they capture valuable lead information. 

The effectiveness of your forms for lead generation depends on the form you use. A general rule of thumb is the fewer the fields, the more conversions. Keep your contact form as simple as possible, asking only for necessary information. 

Target Each Stage of the Buyer’s Journey 

You’ve heard the adage of not putting all your eggs into one basket. This is true if you want to generate leads on your website. If your website targets a specific group of customers, the lead quality may be high, but conversion rate may be low. 

A big part of lead generation is lead nurturing. When people visit your website, they are all on different stages of the buyer’s journey. To generate leads on your website, it must have content and a strategy for every stage of your buyer’s journey. 

The Buying Cycle

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Have Specific Pillar Pages for Each Buyer Persona 

Pillar pages are standalone pages of your website that offer visitors specific content and/or digital assets. They often require a visitor to enter their contact information to access the content. Common pillar page assets include downloadable ebooks, guides, and other resources. 

As you create your website and its content, you need to know who your ideal audiences are. Once you know the type of content they would find valuable and interesting. One way to do this is to develop buyer personas that represent your ideal customers. 

You’ll need to use data you’ve collected about your current customers to generate a buyer’s persona. The pillar page content on your website should address the pain points of your target audience. It should be clear to your website’s visitors that you have the solution to their problems.

Feature Live Chat 

To ensure your website generates leads, you’ll need to be available 24/7. This is especially important if your business is international. People tend to do much of their research outside of work hours and you’ll lose business by being unavailable.

Live chat makes you always available to answer questions, give information, and address concerns. Live chat uses chatbots installed on your website. You can pre-program the chatbots with common questions and answers.

Have Compelling (and Specific) CTAs

Many websites use the boring “contact us” as a call to action. Because it’s so common, website visitors can overlook them. If you want to generate quality leads, be creative with your CTAs.

Unique calls to action will get the attention of your website’s visitors. They should also be specific in how you want leads to contact you. 

Call To Action Example

Source

Use Videos

Tell your company’s story and highlight your products and services with videos. Video demonstrations of your offerings in action are effective ways to generate interest in them. People not sure how your products or services work can watch a video of them.

Include testimonial videos from satisfied customers and “behind-the-scenes” videos of your business. You should use a variety of different videos on your website. Make sure the videos are short (no more than 2 minutes), compressed, and don’t need a media player. 

Videos are so popular and effective in engaging your target audience that 86% of all businesses now include videos in their website content.

Using a mixture of different videos helps your website generate leads by:

  • Catching peoples’ attention and sparking their interest
  • Providing valuable, easy-to-consume information
  • Giving your company credibility 
  • Making your business personable

Conclusion and Take-Homes

Your website will change as your value proposition and message pivots. The goal of your website is to generate leads. A solid lead-generating website begins with planning. 

You won’t see instant growth in conversions with a new website. It will take time for your SEO and SEM campaigns to start bringing people to your site. Targeting leads on every buyer’s journey stage and an easy contact form are two ways to improve your website.

As the adage goes, fail to plan – plan to fail. Put careful thought into your website. Don’t be afraid to make adjustments if something isn’t working.  

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DiSC profiling

How the DiSC Profiling Method Can Help You Manage Your Leads

Lead Nurturing, Sales /

A guest article by Yvan de Canson, content marketer at Salesbox

Being able to identify the natural behavior of your leads and adapt to it is one of the most useful skills you can develop when selling. Because selling in the end is all about building trust and truly connecting with someone.

In this article we will talk about the DiSC method, a method that will help you to identify the natural behavior of your leads and adapt to it. This method fits particularly well with Sales because of its simplicity in allowing you to take quick decisions; an important factor in the difficult Art of Selling. If you know the DiSC method, your closing, your lead generation, and your lead qualification will be more efficient.

The basics of the DiSC profiling method

First, let’s talk a little bit about the DiSC profiling method so you can have a clear understanding of what are its benefits.

The DiSC profiling method is used to analyze people’s natural behavior. It is based on the research studies of William Marston, an american psychologist at Harvard during the 1930’s. It’s a non-judgmental method which seeks only to describe the different types of behavior you can observe among people.

The conclusion of William Marston’s model is that there are four different types of behavior (D, I, S, C) and that everyone’s attitude exhibits a mix of them.

The DiSC method’s ultimate goal is to describe the natural behavior a person will adopt when confronted with a situation. Therefore, it’s based on two questions that everyone asks themselves subconsciously when any situation appears:

  • Are the surroundings naturally friendly or unfriendly ?
  • Do I feel stronger or weaker than the environment ?

Some people will always see the environment as hostile and others will naturally think that the surroundings are friendly. The same applies to the degree of control and influence on the surroundings.

Some people will naturally feel they have a tight control on the situation and others will instinctively feel the opposite. This natural feeling is not directly related with reality. It is more like an instinct and neither one is good or bad.

Based on the answers of these two questions the DiSC model separates behaviors into four different groups (D,I,S,C). Going further, each type is enriched with a color as well (Red, Yellow, Green, Blue).

Everyone is a combination of these different behaviors but what distinguishes us is our dominant type and the percentage of each one in our unique mix.

Dominant Style (RED) : This is the style that describes people’s behavior when they feel stronger than a hostile environment. They want to overcome obstacles in order to achieve their goals. They are challenge-driven and do not fear taking some risks and changing if they think it can help them because of their strong self-confidence.

Influential Style (YELLOW): This the behavior people adopt when they feel being in a friendly environment they can control at wish. Therefore I-Style behaviorists are looking to influence their surroundings through friendly persuasion; they want to be involved and accepted by others.

Steady Style (GREEN) : This behavioral style is adopted by someone who feels being in a friendly environment he or she can’t really control. That is why the primary goal of a GREEN person is to maintain good relationships with others and don’t do anything that can lead to the transformation of the friendly surroundings in a hostile environment.

Consciousness Style (BLUE) : People will adopt this behavioral style when they feel weaker than a naturally hostile environment. People with C-style behavior will try to protect themselve by using pre-existing rules and structures. They will try to do the “correct” thing and minimize the risks of making mistakes so that nobody can point an accusing finger at them.

How can the DiSC profiling method help you with your leads?

The DiSC profiling method will help you closing deals.

The first and direct benefit of the DiSC method on your Sales is your better ability to identify the natural behavior of your potential customers and adapt to it (communication, body language, writings etc.). That will help you to close deals more easily because your one-to-one communication will be more close to your lead’s preferred communication style (mirror your customer).

First, what is at stake is your ability to identify the DiSC color of your lead. To do that you can use the O.A.R method (Observe, Asses Recognize) that we will describe in one of our next articles.

Then knowing the behavior style of your lead you will be able to pick the right argument that will resonate in your prospects’ minds.

For example a BLUE person will pay more attention to facts and data in order to make the “correct” decision. You should be able to prove any points of your speech. On the other hand, YELLOW type will be more focused on what other people will think about them if they buy your products. Therefore, you should insist on previous successful clients that you know your I-Style prospect will value.

Finally, you will be able to say your argument with the appropriate tone, rhythm and through the relevant canals. For example, a D-Style will appreciate short, straight to the point emails that won’t waste their time. On the contrary, a S-Style will appreciate a warm phone call because they want to see if they can trust you before making any deals.

The take-away is that the DiSC profiling method will make it easier to connect and build trust with a prospect because you will know his natural behavior and adapt to it. Eventually, it will be easier to close deals.

The DiSC model will make your lead generation and lead qualification more efficient.
The more you can identify people’s natural behavior, the more you become efficient when selling. The first reason is that you can identify your own natural behavior. You can tell what are your strengths, your weaknesses, which type of behavior your feel comfortable with and which not.

It’s always easier to deal with people of your own dominant behavior since the interaction is natural.

Your lead qualification is easier because you are able to say quite quickly if a prospect will be a good fit for you or not. If you identify a lead with a behavior which suits you, that you can adopt naturally, then you can proceed but if not you won’t loose time and energy and maybe pass it to one of your colleagues. If you don’t have a suitable colleague then you can adopt your communication to suit the behaviour of your lead. It is crucial to mirror your customer and make them feel “at home” and trust you.

After a while selling your product or service you will most likely be able to detect certain patterns among your best customers. Maybe you will see that 50% of them have a D-Style and therefore you can use the DiSC model in a more proactive way for your lead generation.

You can add a DiSC colors to your Target Customer Profile and try to adapt your overall communication to it. That is to say your website (landing page), your content (blog, posts), etc…

You can even use a CRM, such as Salesbox, to send custom email marketing campaigns in function of each DiSC colors and increase your open rate. Salesbox also comes packaged with the possibility to add the correct DiSC-color to each lead or existing business contact, to make it easier for colleagues (managers, other sales reps, pre-sales, support, delivery, finance) to know how to communicate correctly with the lead/customer.

All of this will make your lead generation more efficient. The DiSC model, as we just saw, is a brilliant behavioral model that will make you more efficient as a sales representative. But on the top of that, the DiSC model can be used in various domains where behavior matters. For example it can help you to be a better manager : it’s easier to motivate someone if you know what triggers him/her. It can also help you in your recruitment process in order to determine if the behavior of a candidate will probably fit or not with his/her potential manager’s.

So, you see there is plenty application for the DiSC model within Sales and Business and if you want to dig more you can visit our blog: Salesbox Blog.

yvan-salesbox

Yvan de Canson

Content Marketer at Salesbox

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robert novorolsky

How to Contact Leads

Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Sales /

This article is part of our three step guide on lead generation basics. For this step, which is the third and final step of lead generation, we discuss how to contact leads. This is arguably the most important step, which can be anything from marketing automation to personal contact, because it’s where the beginning of a sale truly begins to take shape. A quick recap of what we previously talked about: In the first step, we talked about what a lead and lead hacking is, in the second step we outlined the process of lead qualification, and now we will share the best practices of lead contacting.

What Do You Do Once You’ve Identified a Lead?

This article is about what to do once you’ve identified a lead. While there is no absolute answer to this, there are few things you should be considering to make the strongest introduction possible. The items you should be considering include:

  1. Lead name (a person or company)
  2. Contact details
  3. Subject matter

You will need 1 and 2 (pre-conditions) in order to make contact and talk (step 3).

Customer example question:

“I have a question regarding on how to follow up on possible leads. What if I notice a company is coming back regularly to check out our services, how can I best contact this company? Mail, phone? I don’t want to look like a stalker. Is there any proven strategy or best practices on this subject?”

Much depends on your company’s sales workflow. Is your product high-end – with service contracts, or are you targeting SME (small and medium enterprise) clients. How long is your sales cycle, do you provide a demo, do you have a dedicated sales team to contact leads, etc. These parameters will define the structure of the dialogue. In some cases the lead will get in touch with you, and in some cases you will be initiating contact. Lead generation software (keeping track of potential clients) helps in both scenarios because you can see what your lead is doing (what they are interested in) and their level of interest. “Strike while the iron is hot”. Once you have contact points and subject matter, you should make contact. Try a combination of both telephone and email. Telephone takes more energy, and is more effective when you actually get to speak to the right person. We’ve learned that a combination of both telephone and email works best. We’ve also learned that, in terms of best practices, you want to make an initial call (or email) that is short and sweet. Narrow the conversation down to a single deliverable, if possible. Important: once you make a promise, any promise, no matter how small – make sure you absolutely 100% follow-up. This is trust-building.

How Can LeadBoxer Help You to Contact Leads

LeadBoxer, or any other lead generation software, automates the process of determining who to call and/or email. Many established B2B sites receive hundreds or even thousands of visitors (potential leads) on a weekly basis. Time is often of the essence here. It is not humanly possible to screen all traffic, although it may be a good idea to have different people sort traffic, and do the actual contacting. This is where the software comes is. By “qualification” we mean an automated system for sorting potential leads and ranking them based on qualifying metrics. Allowing you to contact leads which you might have otherwise missed.

How to Contact Leads Read More »

cold leads

Why are Warm Leads Better for Your Business?

Lead Generation, Sales, Warm Leads /

Contribution from freelance writer Jackie Wills

Anyone involved in sales and marketing knows that developing sales through cold calling (cold leads) can be a thankless and frustrating task. In the modern age, though, an effective digital marketing strategy can mean that prospective clients already know all about your business and are ready to convert into customers with just a little encouragement. Welcome to the world of warm leads. An effective web presence and strong social media engagement means that the word is already out there regarding your business. People will be aware of your service and your unique selling points, and the whole sales dynamic becomes easier and more successful. This means better conversion rates and less time wasted on trying to develop interest in your product or service from scratch.

Is cold calling dead?

Everyone has experience of a cold call, whether it is a telephone call from a double glazing company, an unsolicited email offering you car insurance or a catalogue through your letterbox. Cold calls do generate some sales leads, or nobody would be doing them, but generation and conversion rates are poor. An increasing number of people block unsolicited calls and emails, and there is a school of thought that cold calling is no longer worth the effort. In the majority of cases, cold calls get you off on the wrong foot with the customer and put you at an instant disadvantage. They are suspicious of you and your motives, they never asked you to call and you probably interrupted them in the middle of dinner. Not the best start for a successful future.

What are warm leads?

A warm lead is someone who has already shown an interest in your product or service. They might have taken a look at your website or signed up for an email newsletter. Or perhaps they have followed you on social media or read an article or blog post that you have published. At the very least, you can be confident that warm leads are aware of and are interested in your product or service and have demonstrated an interest in learning more about it. They are far more promising than cold leads, as the initial “foot in the door” part is not necessary. There will not be the same level of suspicion and reluctance to engage. Many warm leads will approach you, rsocather than you having to chase them, but there are others that just need a little push in the right direction.

Getting hotter – qualified leads

A qualified lead is one that is a step further on in the buying cycle. While warm leads are aware of what you have to offer, a qualified lead is one that specifically needs that product or service. For example, if you operate an Italian restaurant in New York, then warm leads might be those who look at your social media pages and sign up for newsletters. They know something about your restaurant, and might be prepared to give it a try if they were in the neighborhood. Compare this with someone who has googled “Italian restaurant in New York” – this is a qualified lead, as it is someone who is specifically looking for a service just like yours.

Focus on Warm Leads

SEO experts Search Engine Journal carried out some research on warm leads versus cold, and the results are remarkable. They concluded that search-driven leads have a 14.6% close rate compared to just 1.7% for cold leads. This is simply because warm leads are already better prospects. Cold calls mean a lot of wasted time on prospects who have given no thought to your offering.

Identifying warm leads

The digital age is all about big data. There is more information available regarding every part of a business than ever before. Everyone who clicks on a link, conducts a search or uses an app leaves a unique data stream. The amount of data that’s being created and stored every day is truly mind-boggling, and it just keeps growing. The company that makes the best use of the data at its disposal is the one that will gain an edge over its competitors, but in the grand scheme of things, only a small percentage of data is actually analyzed and used to make critical insights. By making use of online lead generation tools, you can identify who is visiting your website and why. This gives you some useful information as to what people are looking for, and how they are driven to you. It provides a ready-made list of warm leads for you to develop into paying customers.

Evaluating your best leads

You can achieve unprecedented conversion rates by using the latest proprietary algorithms to rank those warm leads and make sure you focus on the ones that are likely to bring the highest prospects of a completed sale. Traditional sales strategies have relied on what is known as the BANT approach to evaluate leads. In short, this evaluates the following parameters:

  • Budget: does the potential lead have the funds available to buy your product or service?
  • Authority: is your prospective buyer in the position to make the purchase decision, or will they have to seek approval from somebody else?
  • Need: do they have a specific need that the product or service will satisfy?
  • Time frame: are they in the market for your product now, or at some future date?

Conceptually, there is nothing wrong with the BANT approach, and it has become the go-to sales qualification methodology. However, it does have certain flaws and limitations. For example, the implication is that Budget is the first and most important consideration, when in reality, most people will agree that Need is most important. What is it that people want, what problems are they facing or questions do they seek answers to that have driven them to your business? Customer need should really be the first consideration of anyone in sales, and in order to understand that, you need to know your customers.

Understanding your customers

Customer personas are the basic characteristics of your customer base. They might include basic demographic information such as age, gender, income level and employment status, as well as non-identifiable personal data, including geographic location, personal goals, past behaviour and lifestyle. Through personas, you also learn why they are looking to interact with your business and what needs they think you can satisfy. This information is of critical importance as it helps you decide where to focus your marketing efforts. Traditionally, companies have defined their most valuable customers as those who spend the most money. However, that may be over-simplistic, and there are plenty of other factors to consider, including the following:

  • Acquisition costs: How much did you have to spend on sales and marketing to win this type of customer? If acquisition costs are high and returns are low, then it could be time to rethink your methods.
  • Retention costs: What do you need to do in order to keep your customers? Do they expect a large amount of communication, support or training? In general, acquisition costs are higher than retention costs, so it makes sense to do whatever you have to, in order to maintain a close relationship with your customers and give them no reason to look elsewhere.
  • Average purchase size: On average, how much does your customer spend on a single purchase? Consider this question not just in the aggregate, but by each persona or customer type. Bear in mind that people often make purchasing decisions on the basis of value, not just on price. Ask yourself whether you might sell more to any customer segments through carefully targeted promotions and by developing an awareness and interest in other product lines. Social media coverage can be great for promotions like this.
  • Lifetime value: Single purchases are great, but repeat purchases are better. How much does each segment spend with your business over the course of their lifetime? This metric says a lot about the overall relationship that you have with your customers.
  • Customer satisfaction: To what extent are your customers satisfied with your product or service offering? Can you identify groups of satisfied and dissatisfied customers? If so, what makes one group happy and the other group unhappy? This is a great way to identify areas for improvement, or it could be a case of needing to communicate better to manage customer expectations.
  • Value alignment: Are your target customers actually the people who are buying from you? If not, then who is? Knowing this will help you to further refine your customer segments, and to make sure you are perfectly aligned.

By examining the above metrics, you will have better knowledge than ever about your customers. Armed with this knowledge, you will be in the ideal position to develop those leads that can bring real long-term success to your business and ensure you maintain that all-important competitive edge. In our next article that you can find here, we have discussed our best Lead Generation strategies for 2017.

Why are Warm Leads Better for Your Business? Read More »

ead Management Software Award

LeadBoxer Wins the 2017 Lead Management Software Award

Inspiration, Lead Generation, Sales /

At LeadBoxer we have always let our customers’ needs determine product development. Our lead identification platform has improved dramatically in recent years, and our efforts were confirmed when FinancesOnline, a popular software review platform, distinguished us  with the Lead Management Software Award for both creating efficient sales opportunities, and for our lead generation capabilities.

The platform’s review team prepared a thorough examination of our software and concluded that LeadBoxer meets all of their quality criteria to be recommended both to SME’s and Enterprises.

Their experts prepared a detailed LeadBoxer review, and made a unique correlation between our system’s main functions and more beneficial business processes. The highlight of being featured on this software review platform was receiving two of their most prominent awards, namely the Great User Experience Award and the 2017 Rising Star Award for their lead management software category. We couldn’t be prouder to receive these prestigious recognitions, keeping in mind that both are exclusively reserved for user-friendly and fast-developing applications.

What did FinancesOnline’s experts like the most about LeadBoxer?

According to them, our system enables users to quickly and effectively filter their visitors and streamline the qualification process to work on high value, high quality leads. Basically, they said, LeadBoxer allows businesses to be selective even in a highly-competitive economy, and makes operations effective with unique features such as Smart Lists, Alerts, Auto-Form Tracking, and Identification from anonymous traffic.

Another interesting aspect that readers will learn from the review is that LeadBoxer was praised for being very intuitive to use, alongside the ability to integrate into every ecosystem. These possibilities, combined with automated lead collection, scoring, and qualifying make LeadBoxer a recommended sales automation product, and one of FinancesOnline’s favourite suggestions for saving time and adding value to your business operations.

…

LeadBoxer Wins the 2017 Lead Management Software AwardRead More »

LeadBoxer Wins the 2017 Lead Management Software Award Read More »

linkedin 3

How to contact leads with LinkedIn

Lead Generation, lead hacking, Lead Nurturing, Sales /

LinkedIn is the world’s 4th most popular social network. As a professional social network, LinkedIn is the most popular among salespeople. LinkedIn is our favourite social platform to use, so it was just a matter of time before we wrote a piece about it. This is definitely not the only time we will talk about its usefulness but today, we wanted to talk a little bit about how to contact leads with LinkedIn.

What can you do with leads identified by LeadBoxer?

Scenario: you have installed the LeadBoxer lead pixel into your website. A few days later, you have a list of companies who are interested in your products and services. You are not 100% convinced that you want to call them up and say “Hey, I saw you clicking around on our website, what’s up?”

People are looking for specific information. Therefore, if you can help them get the information that they need, you are helping them, not bugging them.

In this case, we recommend an indirect approach as you can see below.

 

Best Practises

1. When you see that a company has visited your website, target them through LinkedIn (obviously, you can use any alternative to LinkedIn – which is just the example given here).

2. The strategy is to know that a company is interested – and give them information that makes them aware of your services. Keep in mind that if a lead is actively looking for a solution to their problem, they will appreciate good information.

Note: surfing behaviour is Goal-Oriented. People do not visit (B2B) websites because they are curious as to what they look like. People are looking for specific information. Therefore, if you can help them get the information that they need, you are helping them.

3. Use lead/visitor activity (click streams) to know what your leads are actually interested in and speak to the content/ subject-matter of the pages they visited.

In other words, use a prominent bit of the text on the pages visited in the subject heading of your communication. This will immediately capture the person’s interest much more effectively than sending a generic sales pitch.

4. Locating decision-makers – if your product/ service is related to staffing, find the person(s) responsible for Human Resources. Meaning: locate the company on LinkedIn and then you research who is responsible for Human Resources, etc.

5. You can then advertise via LinkedIn in order to post content on that person/ company’s LinkedIn personal feed. Click here for a blog post we wrote on LinkedIn advertising.

 

Step-by-step

a) locate the company identified by LeadBoxer on LinkedIn b) find the person or persons responsible for the problem you solve c) send a LinkedIn invite request d) OR use Chrome extension called (email) Hunter – to locate their email address and email them e) OR send relevant materials via LinkedIn advertising (see above)

How to contact leads with LinkedIn Read More »

customer touchpoints

Definition of customer touchpoints for sales and marketing

Lead Generation, Marketing, Sales /

Visitor or customer touchpoints are any way to collect information in order to qualify a lead. This pertains to sales and marketing cycles where some contact is needed to close or further a deal, for example in the B2B or personalised B2C sectors.

What are customer touchpoints?

In creating a Best Practice guide, we came across extensive literature on the subject, which we are summarising here. To begin with, there is currently a lengthy Wikipedia article running at 20 pages without references, and over 16,000 words. Let’s unpack that.

Goal: the point here is to understand that there are numerous points at which (potential) clients come into contact with brands (products & services). This is the buying / decision-making process, also called customer journey, and can refer to both B2C and B2B scenarios.

For purposes of lead generation, we are concerned with contact points through which decisions to purchase or not purchase are made.

Specific to identifying and nurturing leads, we recommend creating touchpoints that can be measured. In other words, touch points that involve some sort of interaction. Ideally, a touch-point will result in another piece of the puzzle being revealed, meaning that you learn something about your lead, and get a step further in the qualification process.

Definition: a ’visitor touchpoint’ refers to any way to collect information in order to qualify a lead.

We also call this enrichment; it means adding touch-points to your website (or other digital assets) which enrich the information that you have about leads. Please click here to see a list of examples with technical documentation: visitor touchpoints.

Using touchpoints in practice – examples for lead generation

Q: So what does this all mean in the context of nurturing leads?
A: It means an opportunity for companies to structure their information-gathering techniques.

Historically, lead generation technologies created techniques such as contact forms, demo calls, and product surveys for interacting with visitors. This has not changed. What has changed are the interaction points. This technology has been formalised into what is currently called Marketing Automation – which bundles all steps across the spectrum.

List of example touchpoints

  • Blog
  • Trial sign-up
  • Purchase
  • Demo/ video
  • Webinar
  • PDF brochures / downloads
  • Implementation / configuration/ enrichment
  • Customisation process
  • Feedback/ data analysis
  • Automated report generation
  • Email newsletters
  • Contact form
  • Login event
  • (Social media) logins – meaning ‘login with Facebook’ or ‘login with LinkedIn’
  • Downloads
  • Social media sites and feeds
  • For SaaS products, the website itself is the main touchpoint

Useful definitions from Wikipedia article on Touchpoints

“A touchpoint can be defined as any way a consumer can interact with a business, whether it be person-to-person, through a website, an app or any form of communication… Touchpoints allow prospective customers to become knowledgeable on the brand and the benefits offered and allow them to make a decision to whether they will buy the product or service.”

“Touch points are the first association that a customer has with a product or service offered by a company or individual and are the contact points between a customer and said provider of services. The touch point offers a link between the customer and the service, acting as a go between of what the customers wants and what the service provider is offering, providing a central service in the communication between customer and supplier. The touch point is the first interaction that a customer has with a company and that interaction is considered as the starting point of a customer journey.”

“The customer journey/experience is the full involvement that a customer has with a particular brand, starting at the first connection between customer and service, and ending with the purchasing of a product or service and the advocacy of said product or service to others.”

“Touch points provide the basis and foundations for information gathering techniques used by customers.”

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community lunch square

How Long Should a SaaS Free Trial Be?

Marketing, Sales /

One of the most common and most difficult questions that a SaaS company with a free trial asks itself is “how long should a SaaS free trial be?” This question is asked by every SaaS product because every one of these companies has the same goal: getting users to have that moment where everything clicks and they realize why they need the product. Every SaaS product needs to figure out how long it takes to get free trial users hooked, so that they convert into paid customers. …

How Long Should a SaaS Free Trial Be?Read More »

How Long Should a SaaS Free Trial Be? Read More »

lead enrichment 1

Definition: Lead Enrichment

Lead Generation, Sales /

The term lead enrichment is important to know when you’re trying to understand lead generation. When you know the definition of lead enrichment, you have a much more firm grasp on a core concept of sales and lead generation.

What is lead enrichment?

Lead enrichment is when you add actionable intelligence to your sales leads. This means that instead of just seeing an email address, for example, you have a way to add phone number, company details, and more to a lead.

Why is lead enrichment important?

Lead enrichment makes sales easier because when you have more information on a potential customer it becomes easier to know what influences their buying decisions.

This information can be thought of as sales intelligence. When you have enriched leads, you can make smart choices as to how to approach and interact a lead. When you can have a more personable interaction with a lead, you close more deals.

How to enrich your leads better?

A tool like LeadBoxer makes lead enrichment much easier because it has the ability to automatically work with all website forms, give you more information about your web-traffic, and capture lead information on your website.

Tools, such as LeadBoxer, help enrich leads by giving you a lead score, information about the company from a LinkedIn profile, and an understanding of what pages a lead is browsing the most. A great lead enrichment solution will include information such as lead’s career history, how the person is interacting with your product or website, and much more.

The type of lead enrichment tool that we have described above will ideally do the following to the form lengths on your website:

Lead Enrichment

This will make your potential clients more eager to subscribe and fill in your forms without sacrificing important information as everything else will be captured with our cutting-edge technology.

If you want to jump-start your lead enrichment, we suggest creating a free LeadBoxer account. Click here to create an account.

Definition: Lead Enrichment Read More »

double sided referral program 1

How to Create a Double-Sided Referral Program to Boost Sales

Marketing, Sales /

In the online marketing and sales world, the idea of a referral program is commonly talked about. In the standard referral program, a person is incentivized to invite a user to join a product. If the person who was invited joins, the original user earns something as a reward. …

How to Create a Double-Sided Referral Program to Boost SalesRead More »

How to Create a Double-Sided Referral Program to Boost Sales Read More »

user onboarding

2 Different Ways to Think About User Onboarding

Marketing, Sales /

User onboarding matters. A lot.

Having a good product is pointless if you don’t give people the right tools to understand your product. If people don’t understand your product, they are never going to use it and become purchasers.

You have bad user onboarding if you experience the following:

  • Users quickly vanish after signing up.
  • Low conversion rate to paid accounts.
  • High churn rate (people aren’t renewing their paid accounts).

All of the effort that you’re putting towards building a company are effectively going down the drain if you have awful onboarding. Your product doesn’t matter if nobody is willing to use it and everything that you’re doing is a waste of time if you can’t get people to pay for your product and retain the people who are paying for your products.

Do you know your customers?

A person who signs up for your product did so because he or she believed in the promise that you explained in your marketing materials. Your marketing materials explained something that sounded great to the user, but are people finding that your product actually meets the promise once they join?

User onboarding is when you make your marketing promise come to life. To make your promise come to life, you need to creatively introduce people to your features while remaining intensely focused on your customer.

To become intensely focused on your customer, you should be creating a brilliant strategy that embraces of notions of a buyer personas and the jobs-to-be-done theory.

The idea behind buyer personas and the jobs-to-be-done theory are:

  • A buyer persona makes it easier to understand who is signing up for your product or service.
  • The jobs-to-be-done theory makes it easier to understand why people are signing up for your product or service.

If you have a strong understanding of who and why people are using your product or service, you will be able to achieve far greater success.

The two ways different ways to onboard new users.

In this post, we are going to focus on two ways to best onboard new users. The tactics that we are going to discuss are using persona’s to onboard users and also using the jobs-to-be-done theory. Ideally, you won’t just pick one of these theories. But rather, you’ll be able to strategically combine both theories to create a powerful user onboarding machine.

Onboarding customers using a persona.

Because onboarding is a key part of marketing, it’s important to bring the idea of a buyer persona into the onboarding mix.

This is important to do because it makes it so that your customer is the center of the onboarding experience.

For example, Canva relies heavily on persona onboarding to make a memorable initial user experience. They rely heavily on personas by showing three options for new users to pick from. The three options ask if the new user is using Canva for education purposes, for work, or for personal use. Whichever option the new user picks dictates the onboarding flow that he or she will go down.

user onboarding canva

If a user selects that they are using Canva for personal projects, he or she will sample projects for items like birthday cards. If a personal says they are using Canva for business, they will see more professionally-inspired projects to start from. …

2 Different Ways to Think About User OnboardingRead More »

2 Different Ways to Think About User Onboarding Read More »

happy sales team 1

How to Create a Happy Sales Team

Sales /

When your sales team loves their job, they are going to thrive. You want to create a work environment that puts a huge smile on your team members faces, because they know that the time they are spending as a member of your team is potentially the highlight of their professional journey. A happy sales team is an efficient sales team. We did some research into how to keep your employees satisfied.

Here is what we learned:

1. Think about happiness often

If you frequently think about the happiness of your team, you’re likely going to be coming up with ways to continue improving happiness level.

However, it’s important that you don’t obsess over the pursuit of happiness. According to a study by Yale psychologist June Gruber, there can actually be a dark side to happiness. Meaning, that when you fail to meet increased expectations for happiness, you can actually become unhappy. The study explained: “the pursuit of happiness may lead to maladaptive outcomes because it sets people up for disappointment.”

This study is a great reminder that you should remember to think about happiness often, but don’t obsess over it.

2. Consider what type of team you want to build

You need to think about the type of team that you want to build and build your culture of happiness and motivation around that.

Below are some popular types of teams:

  • The Open Team: This type of team is willing to try out new experiences and take risks. An open team is often more willing to make decisions that are bigger risks but have greater potential upside.
  • The Extroverted Team: This type of team is based around the idea of creating a culture where team members draw energy from each other. This is a highly social and thoughtful type of team.
  • The Agreeable Team: This team type is often more compassionate, which means there’s a lot of agreeing happening between team members. This means that this type of team is likely to be less willing to take risks and will make decisions on the safer side.

Once you have a clear idea of the type of team you want to build, it will become a lot easier to build a happy team. It will become easier to build a happy team when you know what type of team you want to build because a clear team vision will allow you to build a cohesive relationship between all team members. The more cohesive and rallied behind a unified vision that a team is, the happy everybody will be.

3. Be an actionable leader

If you’re a leader, you shouldn’t just be leading. You should also be doing too.

A great leader leads by example, so leaders that just sit back and direct often make team members feel belittled or disconnected from the leader. A strong leader knows what he or she needs to be doing because people will follow a leader based on the quality of his or her actions, rather than the leader simply declaring, “I am the leader!”

When there is a strong leader who is leading by example, a team will be happier. And a happy team means more motivation to drive sales forward and here sales enablement can help you.

4. Give employees both freedom and responsibility

Empower your employees to make decisions. When employees, not just leadership, are involved with decision making they instantly feel happier.

In Dennis Bakke’s book, The Decision Maker, he shares an interaction between an employee in HR, named Angela, and the CEO of her company:

“You’ve got the responsibility, but you’ve also got the freedom. Think through these questions. Figure out what you think will work best. Do whatever you need to. If you want to connect with other people who are thinking about this, get advice from other businesses, you let me know. Whatever research you need to do, we’ll make it happen. And then come to me with your decisions about how to handle human resources going forward.”

“So you can sign off on them?” Angela challenged.

Tom shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “So I understand what’s happening in the business.”

This is a simple interaction, but it helps remind us that when employees have the ability to make meaningful choices, they’re going to ultimately be much happier and willing to contribute to the company.

5. Establish team values

Every good team has strong values.

Emphasizing values to team members will help define the path at which ideas come to life; shaping how the team operates and moves a business forward.

To make your sales team as happy as possible, pick out the simple values that matter the most to your organization. Think about factors such as positivity, creativity, and other cultural values that you know will help enhance the growth of your company.

If you’ve done a good job hiring, your team will quickly be able to rally around your team values.

The ability to rally around a shared set of values will make a team more cohesive and a cohesive team will be happiest working together (which means the success of the team will propel further, faster!).

6. Hire the right people

Hiring the right people is easier said than done. But, if you’re not doing a good job hiring, you’re likely building an unhappy team that won’t work well together.

In his book Good to Great, author Jim Collins compares the hiring (and firing) process to putting people on a bus:

“If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we’ll figure out how to take it someplace great.”

This quote is a great reminder as to how important it is to build the right team, by hiring the right people.

To hire the right people that allow you to build a happy sales team, you should have a very disciplined hiring process. If there’s any doubt in your mind over a person you’re considering hiring, they probably aren’t a good fit. On the reverse side, if you hire somebody and quickly determine they are a bad fit, it’s smart that you let this person go quickly. It’s smart to let this person go because when you keep people around who aren’t a good culture fit, it can be detrimental to the company and destroy any shot you have at making a team that works together effectively and is happy.

Do you have a happy sales team?

Before looking at ways that you can improve the happiness of your sales team, you should step back and think about if they’re already happy. If your team is happy, think about why they are happy and maintain that; rather than trying to push the level of happiness forward even more.

If you have determined some items that you think make your sales team happy, we’d love to hear them. Let us know what’s making your team so happy in the comments.

How to Create a Happy Sales Team Read More »

improve free trial to paid signup social

How to Improve Free Trial to Paid Signup Conversions

Marketing, Sales /

Offering sales prospects free trials is often a very valuable marketing tool. It gives potential customers the opportunity to try your product, with their own data or experiment with how they would ultimately end up working with it.

Getting users to signup for a free trial is the easy part, making them actually use your product during the trial period is the really hard part. If the person in the free trial isn’t using your product during the trial period, there is no way that you can expect them to actually convert into a paid customer when the trial finishes. …

How to Improve Free Trial to Paid Signup ConversionsRead More »

How to Improve Free Trial to Paid Signup Conversions Read More »