Dear Bob,
It’s Paul in Marketing. How are you? I haven’t seen you much around the office lately; I know we’re both crazy busy people. You’re busy training all those sales guys and going to conferences. I’ve been speaking to some of the folks in sales recently, and they seem to be in better spirits lately since we implemented our new initiatives. I’m sure you remember the old days
- Your definitions of quality leads differed from ours. We weren’t on the same page when it came to target marketing and reaching your desired sales-ready leads.
- You complained that we constantly gave you reports and data dumps without any actionable plans and recommendations.
- Your view of our company’s value proposition was different from what we were promoting!
- You guys spent too much time with those “tire-kicker” leads which wasted much of your team’s time. You didn’t know at the time that those doing initial research could be customers down the road if nurtured properly.
- In fact, I was shocked that you guys had poor follow-up practices with the leads we were sending you.
- You guys only knew the basics of Salesforce.com. You didn’t take advantage of the tools and features that if entered properly, could help us in marketing make better decisions.
- You folks stumbled with social media and kept questioning the value of the time and resources.
I’m glad we agreed together to install a marketing automation program because I had the same goals as you; generate quality leads and more sales opportunities. We’ve always been on the same page! To recap, we’re now able to provide these benefits to your team:
We in marketing are now withholding leads that don’t qualify to be in the sales pipeline yet. So we’re sending you those that are closer to being sales accepted than before. I am sure you noticed your increased close rates.
- Because of all those white papers, podcasts, and webinars that we’ve been promoting over the last few months, we’re been training those “tire-kickers” and I know that some of those early prospects are now engaging with you guys; some have purchased!
- It’s nice that the cold call time is much less now. Nobody likes to be sold to when they’re not ready. But we’re glad you see the value in the nurturing process. It’s much easier to have an engaging discussion with a prospect when you guys know what content those prospects downloaded and clicked on.
- It’s pretty cool when your sales people get notified when your prospects visit web pages, download content, raise lead scores, and click on emails; Gives your guys reasons to call those engaged prospects! Nothing like improved, real-time insights to make your job easier.
- So you have your CRM syncing with our marketing automation system. We’re sharing and updating together. It’s all about working together to improve quality leads, improve conversions, and measure performance more accurately.
Bob, I know it took awhile to get used to the process, so I thank you for the support. As you know, most of your prospects are doing a ton of research on our products and services on the Internet, so that’s why we combined our new marketing automation system with a better lead generation program to capture leads by offering our good content to those looking for answers via search engines and social media.
Here’s to continued growth! I’m preparing a detailed report on our solutions for the board members, so please give me a call (610) 604-0639 or email me to go over our new lead management approach in more detail.
Regards,
Paul
