Thoughts on how to follow-up on website leads when you use marketing automation
A few months ago, at the MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing summit in Boston, I was asked on how best to follow-up on leads generated via the web by Richard Hill. Richard writes over at the Idea Exchange blog on marketing automation related topics.
Marketing automation tools are useful because they can give us a ton of visibility into the visitors to our website, what they looked at, etc., and when visitors fill out form, we can link their contact information to their other offline marketing touch points.
The question is how do we use this information? Should we wait? Should we pounce right away and call them? What’s the best way to do this that helps us best identify leads? Here’s my thoughts to this question via a short interview I did with Richard Hill on, “To pounce or not to pounce?”
Here’s some tips Richard captured on how to better engage web leads:
- Marketing and sales should jointly develop a website visitor engagement strategy.
- Develop follow-up materials and content that your sales team can use to bring extra value to enhance their follow-up interactions that extend beyond the content future customers can get via your website.
- Create a call guide to help your sales team to be a resource first before they try “qualifying” the sales opportunity. What questions are must have verses nice to have?
- If you’re using marketing automation, coach your team doing follow-up calls not to directly mention your marketing automation tracking capabilities (that can be ‘creepy’) think instead of how you can tailor a relevant conversation based on the content consumed being the topic your sales team starts with.
Also, I would add if you are generating a good volume of leads online consider creating or outsourcing a specialized lead engagement and qualification team.
Related Posts:
On Lead generation: Insist on lead quality over quantity
Social media’s impact on web forms and landing pages
Optimizing webforms to generate more leads through your website
Why Most B2B Sites Fail to Convert Sales Leads
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Those are some very useful steps. We’re in the process of refining our lead handling right now.
I liked your points about developing follow-up materials for sales and coaching them not to reference marketing automation directly.
It is important that your sales folks understand the process–so the conversation is more natural. However, if you get them to familiar or neglect to guide them in creating a natural conversation the customer feels like they have just been introduced to a stalker.
Great website!The very useful for me four marketing tips.I really like the blog.Keep up…