Sales Prospecting Using LinkedIn

When it comes to sales prospecting, the use of the social selling
channel to acquire customers is now a major activity. Sales people are
using LinkedIn, Twitter and other social networks for lead generation
activity and to engage buyers. When it comes to sales prospecting, the
new buzzword is “Smarketing” meaning sales and marketing departments
working together to ensure they maximize sales funnel growth, while
reducing the customer acquisition costs. So let us assume your content
marketing team is publishing quality articles to share, however, the
sales process is proving quite challenging and you want to know HOW to
successfully use social networks in the sales prospecting process?


So ask any sales person on the obvious place to start hunting for B2B
sales leads and they will probably answer – LinkedIn. But would they
know how to engage in conversations on LinkedIn groups for the benefit
of the business, while not damaging the company’s image.

What LinkedIn groups are and are not

LinkedIn groups are great when it comes to following or engaging with
industry thought leaders, to share knowledge and ideas. Buyers also use
the groups to make themselves aware of trends or brands, while sales
people use them as a means to identify prospects. The good news is that
there is a LinkedIn group for just about any topic, interest or business
insight. But let me explain what LinkedIn groups are NOT, before a
sales person jumps in to connect with prospects. They are not to be used
as blatant promotional channels or just to sell your product. They are
also not places to make endless connections with the single purpose of
trying to nab a potential customer.


However, LinkedIn groups if used correctly with practiced skills, can
provide a channel where sales and marketing teams can engage in thought
provoking discussions with prospective buyers. Let me repeat, LinkedIn
Groups are not a place for the traditional approach to selling. Posting
comments, promoting your products or appearing as an online sales person
will quickly lower your credibility within the group and will deter
many people from connecting or engaging with your profile. LinkedIn
groups are not to be used for spamming. In fact the social network has
taken action to prevent spam, poor content and job-postings appearing in
conversations, by the means of filtering its content.

Pitfalls on LinkedIn to be aware of

LinkedIn constantly introduces new policies to their social network,
which can lead to hidden difficulties for sales people. It is important
that you are aware of all these pitfalls around the social network,
before I can properly go on to explain how LinkedIn groups can be used
for sales prospecting.


Here are the pitfalls to avoid:


1. Posting low quality content




Recently, groups have been purposely made private so as to enhance
the quality of conversations being discussed within them. It was once
the case where sales people used to be able to bombard open chats with
constant messages promoting their products, leading to poor quality and
disengaging conversations. However, this new enhanced privacy feature
limits this from occurring. Industry leaders and group members will now
boycott poor content that does manage to be published within groups.
This means you need to avoid posting weak content, because once trust
and credibility have been lost, they are hard to regain.


2. Predictability




To facilitate high quality discussions occurring, people now have the
option of adding images to conversations. Such images may include
info-graphics, which are essentially attractive e-poster displays of
data. Info-graphics are fast becoming so important to the digital
marketing realm, as they are essential tools when it comes to engaging
prospective leads. Having said that though, you need to make sure you
don’t become predictable. It often happens that once sales people
experience a good reaction from a certain image that they have posted,
they will continue to post similar content because sales people think
that’s what will generate the most likes. However, this way of thinking
is medieval and sales people will soon appear very boring to prospects.
Don’t be afraid to mix it up by alternating between different images and
blog articles. Always make sure you are providing your audience with
new insightful material. Avoid posting the same predictable content all
the time.


3. Lack of consistency




Consistency is key with any social network, not  just LinkedIn. You
need to post on a regular basis or you will loose your following. Not
only that, but it will also drastically decrease the awareness of your
product or service online. No point in commenting sporadically, in other
words commenting in irregular intervals or whenever it suits you, like
for example once a week. By doing that, it would be hard to establish
promising leads and your social media account would be deemed useless in
the sales prospecting process. The same goes for the converse.
Over-commenting can be just as damaging as under-commenting. By being
over-active on social media, it could be interpreted as your business
having nothing else to do, or you could appear very irritating which
will ultimately discourage people from engaging with your profile.


4. Inaccurate Assumptions


Unfortunately or fortunately, whatever side of the argument you
support, LinkedIn notifies you once someone has viewed your profile.
This however can often be misleading and dangerous to sales people in
particular, because innocent profile views are often mistaken for actual
prospects. Sales people need to disassociate likes with people wanting
to link with them. Or profile views with people automatically wanting to
buy from them. This might not even be the case at all. Instead of
making hasty assumptions and jumping straight into the selling process,
you instead need to research these leads by analyzing their social media
profiles. Once suspect’s interests and buying intentions have been
established, they can then be treated as prospects.

My LinkedIn Sales Prospecting Process

So now that you are aware of the pitfalls, I can go on to explain HOW
I use LinkedIn for sales prospecting. Why many people fail, when it
comes to online sales prospecting, is because they don’t understand the
model or skip the stages that are involved. Online sales prospecting is a
series of steps that needs to be followed in a chronological order. It
is like learning to drive a car. You must know the rules of the road and
understand the components of the vehicle before you can be allowed to
sit behind the wheel. It’s the exact same with online sales prospecting,
you must understand the process before you can jump straight in joining
LinkedIn groups.


Below I have included an image of a generic sales prospecting model
that can be applied to any social network, not just LinkedIn.





Step 1. It is so important that you know where your
buyers are. By identifying your target audience, you can then determine
what social media site you are going to use to attract leads. For B2B
selling, LinkedIn is by far the best social network to use. Through this
site you can gain valuable information about potential buyers. Back to
the car analogy, when driving in icy conditions, you will need to decide
how you will tackle the dangerous road ahead, so as that you can safely
arrive at your destination. So for example you might decide to approach
the roads with extreme caution by driving slow. It is the same with
leads, you will have to decide how you are going to approach different
prospects. You need to come up with an angle that other unsuccessful
sales people may have failed to think of.  This is where researching
social profiles will help. The key is to know your customer, know what
they are interested in and what is going to persuade them to buy from
you.


Step 2. Once you have determined where you are going
to attract leads, you then need to engage with them. For this you will
need an arsenal of content at your disposal. Info-graphics and blog
articles can be great tools for sales prospecting. Again, as I mentioned
earlier, make sure you mix up the types of content you use. The last
thing you want is to appear predictable. Your aim is to portray an
interesting online persona, using insights and valuable content, that
will attract people  to your profile.


Step 3. Lead nurturing is the next stage of the
process. Once prospects have been identified you will then need to start
developing relationships with them by adding value to places where they
post comments, by understanding what catches their interest and
ultimately by understanding the tone and nature of their online
existence. Remember, buyers are way more informed than they once used to
be, so you must listen to the needs of prospects and publish material
that will provide them with the information to answer their questions.


Step 4. Once you have successfully completed the
first 3 steps, you can now connect with prospects directly. InMail and
email are important communication methods used to invite the buyer to
consider your product or service. It is important that you act quickly
and don’t delay, when contacting prospects directly. There is an optimum
time frame that sales people must act within, in order to secure a
sale. The last thing you want is for another sales person to ruin all
your hard work and nab a potential customer from you. That is why it is
so important that the second a prospect is established, action is taken
immediately to engage deeper with them.


Step 5. This is the only part of the model that
relates to the traditional selling process. This is the stage where you
want to close the deal and convert the prospect into a customer. Sales
people will do everything they can here to promote and convince the
prospect that they need this product. This stage is normally carried out
over the phone.

Cheat sheet to maximizing LinkedIn Leads

Request to Join Group Pages


Now that you understand the process, it is time to put the theory
into practice and join some groups. There are over 412,322 groups on
LinkedIn that people can join, however sales people must be aware of the
100 group only limit.


I would recommend sales people firstly start off by joining groups
that bear relevance to the product that they wish to sell. So for
example, if you want to sell Lead Generation software, you will want to
target LinkedIn groups containing keywords such as ‘Lead Generation’,
‘Marketing Automation’, ‘Marketing Leaders’ or ‘Sales & Marketing
Directors’. Because what benefit would it be joining a general marketing
group if you were selling a specific product such as Lead Generation
Software? This would be a complete waste of time. Yes, it cannot be
denied that more general groups tend to cater for far more interesting
and broader discussions. However, it will be far easier to identify
prospects and connect with them in more specific groups. At the end of
the day, your job is to generate potential leads that will lead to
sales, not to appear active online and join as many groups as you can.


Engage and be Active in Discussions


 When you have been accepted into a certain group,
it is time to start proving your credibility by showing that you are an
expert in that specific field. Constantly engaging in conversations and
sharing useful insights in the group can accomplish this. However
members must be careful that they obey the group rules, when sharing
content or engaging in discussions. Most groups ban the publication of
promotional content within them; so sales people need to make sure that
they comply with these codes of practice.


Do not be vague when contributing to discussions. Always be specific
and provide valuable insights to the group. The more genuine and
interesting you appear, the more you will get noticed and the more
potential prospects will want to connect with you. Communication is a
2-way channel. It’s the same with LinkedIn groups. It is essential that
you initiate conversations, respond and react to activity occurring in
the group. By being proactive, you will increase your sales funnel quite
rapidly, as people will become curious as to whom you are and will
therefore want to connect with you.


Forget your Traditional Sales Approach


It is so important that you don’t come across as a traditional sales
person in LinkedIn groups. People will not want to engage with you, if
you are seen to be completely self-orientated. Forcefully promoting
yourself or products, in these groups, wont resonate well with other
users. The whole point of a group is to be a cohesive unit, where ideas
and knowledge can be shared. A group is essentially a community. There
is no mention of “I” or “Me” at all. They are completely self-less
entities. The minute you act in a ‘salesy’ manner, you will lose your
reputation and goodwill, and will not be taken seriously in the group.


It is all about social selling these days. Instead of going into
these groups with the aim of promoting a product by posting blatantly
obvious promotional material, go in with the aim of creating subtle
awareness through engagement. The key to generating sales via LinkedIn
is by being subtle. By posting abstract content that doesn’t directly
apply to your product, you are subtly creating awareness about your
sector, which will in turn benefit your business.Then once you have
identified interest in your product through likes and shares, you can
then take these ‘warm leads’ into the private-sphere and contact
prospects directly. Because they have already displayed signs of
interest online, they wont mind you reaching out to them.


Utilize InMail or Automated Social Selling Tools.


 So now you want to convert the goodwill and
connections into customers. The last step is to take the conversation
from the consideration to the active buyer engagement phase. When a
prospect has been identified and online engagement has been carried out
with them, you can then decide to take the conversation offline. By
sending them helpful insights and relevant articles, you can then start
to build trustworthy relationships with prospects, which is referred to
as the lead nurturing process. Once you have established the buying
intention of your prospect, you can then finally make the move and start
selling your product and pitching to them directly.


A great way to do this is through InMail or by using automated
selling tools. You can try message them on LinkedIn, but a far more
effective way, is by reaching out to them over email or phone. But
that’s easier said than done. Where are you supposed to get hold of
prospects’ contact details without having to conduct hours of online
research? The answer is by using automated social selling software. This
handy piece of software compiles all possible contact information about
your prospect that you will need into one database, which can be
accessed in seconds. This drastically cuts down on time spent tediously
researching a prospect’s email or telephone number. This extra time
saved can then instead be put back into actually selling, the sole focus
of a sales person’s job.


It is so essential that you take 30 minutes everyday to engage in LinkedIn Group discussions. Make sales prospecting
on social media a part of your daily routine. Be consistent by posting
regularly, in order to maintain high awareness and consideration rates
among prospects. This will prove very beneficial to you in the long run,
as it will drastically cut down your time spent cold calling. By using
LinkedIn Groups properly to sales prospect, you will dramatically
increase the success of your sales efforts.



Sales Prospecting Using LinkedIn | Lead Generation and Social Selling Articles and News

How to Make Cold Calling Easier

Cold calling – two words that sales people usually dread. You
know the scenario,sales are behind target and sales prospecting is
always the answer. Your sales manager calls you and the rest of the
sales team in for the weekly meeting which, funnily enough, always seems
to be about how do we generate more leads.

Sales manager: ‘Folks, we are behind target! We need to hit the phones and get sales prospecting.’

You: ‘Sure, but I’ve used up all my marketing qualified leads. Is it back to trawling through LinkedIn again?’

Boss: ‘LinkedIn, phone directory… just get on the phones!’ *sounding like he doesn’t know where to start*.

Sound familiar? But one way or another,
these types of conversations are happening in sales organizations all
over the globe. So let me bring you to sales paradise island – a sales
person’s utopia, a world where every prospect would be expecting your
call and know exactly why you were calling. The conversation would be
flowing with witty banter exchanged back and forth. The genuine interest
they’ve been showing in your product or service throughout the call
would inevitably end in a sale. Easy! Right?

Sorry but time to wake up as this is not the
reality which sales people face. As you know, a lot of time and energy
goes into simply compiling a list of prospects to call. But once they
answer, sellers are often affected by the dreaded ‘why are you calling me today?‘ syndrome. Cold calling with nothing more than a name and number leaves the sales person having to ‘wing it’ and hope they get lucky.

Cold calling is an essential component in
making that pipeline grow, so it is something that sellers cannot avoid.
If only there was a way to make the whole process of cold calling a lot
easier. Well maybe there is!

Let me explain how cold calling can suddenly
become a lot easier with lead generation tools/software combined with
my few tips on how to approach each phone call.

Continuous Quality Leads with Automated Lead Generation Software

Before you can start making those calls, you
need a list of people to call. A list of relevant prospects. A recent
survey revealed that over 35% of companies claimed that they lacked
access to quality prospects. Almost 50% said they wanted the number of
sale leads to increase. Imagine coming in to your office on your sales
prospecting days to find a verified list of quality prospects, based on
relevant profiles, with contact information sitting on your desk – Sound
like that utopia that exists only in your head? Think again.

Automated lead generation services do the
hard work for you by consistently providing you with your most relevant
and influential leads with detailed information. Automated lead
generation significantly reduces the time you spend simply identifying
prospects because this technology produces a continuous supply of custom
profiles and contact information based on social data. All the data you
need to convert leads. Faster. This way, your prospects are simply an
email or phone call away, which is also supplied to you!

Prospecting is essential to the sales
process. You may have the skills to sell ‘ice to an Eskimo’ but if you
are spending all of your time simply looking for prospects, and not
actually interacting with them, what is the point? As soon as you can
speed up the identification of prospects and reach the point where you
are actually talking to buyers, who are genuinely interested in your
services, every call becomes a lot easier.

So automated lead generation software
provides you with a continuous list of who to call. But what next? What
do I say? I don’t want to be a deer in the headlights. I can’t take much
more rejection!

Information gives you Confidence

If you are to remember one key thing before cold calling, remember
this – information gives you confidence. Before engaging with each new
prospect, learn more about them and go in feeling as prepared as
possible.


Learn about the company they work for. Know exactly why your product
or service would be of interest to them. Learn some of their interests.
Perhaps you two have something in common. Incorporating these into your
initial small talk can help your prospect feel more at ease and make you
seem more relateble and human. Your lead generation service provides
you with a list of all their social media accounts so you can easily
learn a little more about them on a personal level as well as
professional.


Even the most successful salespeople don’t necessarily like cold
calls, but the difference between them and unsuccessful sellers is that
they have realized the importance of confidence. If you are always
polite and exude confidence in what you are doing, the client is more
likely to gain confidence in your company. Even if the call doesn’t end
in a sale or arranging a face-to-face meeting, you know that it is ok
because you did everything you possibly could. You approached that
individual, armed with information, strategy, and the confidence that
comes from it.





The traditional presentation-style of cold calling has proven to have
a negative effect because it creates sales pressure and treats buyers
like simply a number on a list. Creating a natural conversation between
two people is the only way to keep them engaged and interested. A
genuine approach is sure to put your potential customer at ease from the
start. While this person may be the 30th phone call you have made
today, it is important to remember that the person on the other line is
just that – A person! Be polite, genuine, and speak using
easy-to-understand terms.


If you don’t know something, be honest and admit that you don’t. You
have done your preparation on who your prospect is and what you are
calling about, but you are always going to encounter questions that you
may not have to answer to. Reply with something like, ‘I’m not quite
sure about that Ms Roberts, but I will ask my manager and have an answer
for you when I see you next’. There’s no shame in not having all of the
answers, and frankly, your prospects are sure to appreciate your
honesty and willingness to go out of your way to answer their questions.
Realizing that it is alright to not have all the answers can remove a
lot of the anxiety attached to cold calling. It also gives you extra
confidence in your approach.


What Problem Can You Solve for Them?


Once the person at the other end of the call is starting to feel at
ease, you must then clearly explain how your company can solve a problem
which this buyer/customer is facing on why you have selected them to
call. Think about it, how would you react if somebody truly understood
what you were struggling with and had ideas to solve it? If your
prospect feels that you really do understand their particular issues,
then they are more open to hearing your solutions giving you the
opportunity to see if you both are a good match.


Cold calls based on genuine helpfulness and understanding your
prospect and their needs can turn a one-way pitch into a two-way
dialogue.


In a survey, hundreds of decision makers responsible for buying business services and products were asked:


“If a salesperson calls you and leaves a message for you, what kind of message will motivate you to return the call?”


Results showed that over 40% of respondents wanted cold callers to
‘clearly explain how their product/service would benefit my business.’


See yourself as the hero that wants to rescue each prospect from
their business problems, not the bothersome sales person only concerned
about closing deals. This will make cold calling easier.


Mention a Name or Referral

As well as being confident and understanding
your leads issues, buyers are more open to listening if they hear that a
peer of theirs referred them or is using your product. Almost 40% of
buyers claim this, to be more specific. But how does one get a referral
in the first place? Here are two ways:

1) Join a number of networking groups in
which you can share leads and contacts with other like-minded people.
Groups like Business Network International (BNI), Professional Referral
Organization (PRO), and a variety of others that exist for this very
purpose.

2) Discover someone in LinkedIn with whom you have a mutual connection
to the prospect you are calling, or at least can introduce you.

I hope you have realized that cold calling doesn’t have to be as big a barrier as you think it is. Investing in Lead generation tools/software,
knowing your potential customer and understanding their problems all
combine to give you that confidence boost and creates the best possible
outcome for every cold call you make.

How to Make Cold Calling Easier | Lead Generation and Social Selling Articles and News

Customer Acquisition Strategy

The customer acquisition strategy and financial cost of customer
acquisition is a critical factor for any new business survival and often
underestimated in a growing business. The cost of getting customers can
be the difference between success and failure no matter how good a
business believes its product to be.  I once read that the goal of any
business is to acquire, develop and maintain customers at a profit. The
develop and maintain aspects are more clear forward but let’s focus on
the cost associated with acquiring new customers regardless of the
channel.  

Every
business needs to acquire new customers to make products and businesses
work. Whether the product is aimed at enterprises paying big money or
getting thousands of visitors to a website, how a business gets and the
cost of getting customers are the important part.

The
Definition of Customer Acquisition could be defined as “The process of
persuading someone to purchase a company’s goods or services”. The cost
associated with the customer acquisition process is a critical measure
for a business to evaluate in tandem with how much value having each
customer brings to the business.

Is The Business Ready for Customer Acquisition?

Paper
never refuses ink and this saying has been true in many a business or
sales plan when it comes to putting a cost on customer acquisition. The
cost is not just the marketing or sales cost but the time and resource
cost to getting new customers. Has the business planned for the sales
cycle, the demos, the travel, product trials or has a website planned
for the cost from free signups to paid, customer or product support
prior to a customer making a purchase. In other words, can a business
survive while potential customers go through the acquisition cycle?
While a quote like “move fast and break things” is exciting in a company
start-up situation, it may not be the best advice when it comes to
customer acquisition. The decision to start spending investor or
shareholder money taking a product to market and begin acquiring new
customers should be given the weight it deserves. Entrepreneurs or a
business might have spent months or years developing the product, so the
execution of the customer acquisition strategy has to be thought out
very carefully.

Even
before you spend a cent on customer acquisition ask the questions “is
the product ready for some/many customers”? Are there still bugs that
will make the customer interaction with the product flawed? While the
saying “done is better than perfect” to avoid feature creep is
practical; it would be a mistake to launch a broken product and fall at
the first hurdle.

To
take a step back into the business plan around customer acquisition,
can a business tick the box on questions like; how many sales calls per
day do you expect the salesperson to make, do they have a target list of
suspects and prospects, how much activity on the website can the
servers handle? Do you have the customer support with the knowledge
required to respond to the questions from new customers? Does the
product value proposition the salesperson has to sell make sense to
people outside the company? In other words, have you done customer
validation? These are the type of questions that you need to answer
before committing money to a launch.

Being Prepared Always Matters

Any
customer acquisition process is not straight forward or predictable but
especially so for new companies, but that doesn’t mean a plan is not
useful or necessary. The customer acquisition process is far from an
exact science. There are many things that can (and do) go wrong, however
there are some things that any business can do to mitigate risk and
improve the chances of successfully acquiring new customers. Be clear
with your team what “Cost to Acquire Customers” (CAC) means, is it
paying customers, trial customers, engaged prospects or even website
registrations.  In the long run it should only mean the cost to acquire a
paying customer.

Estimate the Cost of Customer Acquisition

Money
for new product or new business launches is hard won. The budget and
time for a start-up may be tight, so the business needs to estimate
“worst case scenario” the cost to acquire customers (CAC) before
beginning the marketing or sales process. A businesses CAC is loosely
defined as the cost of ALL the sales and marketing expenses over a given
period of time, divided by the number of customers the business plans
to acquire in that time frame. While no business can have a firm sense
of the CAC until they begin acquiring customers, having an estimate will
help the business leaders prepare to act accordingly.

Logic
rules, no matter how excited a business is about getting it out there,
do not underestimate the impact of starting the customer acquisitions
spend before the product is ready. The greatest risk apart from
alienating potential customers by launching a flawed product is the
money a business can burn through before it realises it got something in
the product wrong.  Every business should ask, what is the baseline
product I am willing to “show” potential customers and in what target
markets?

Thread
carefully in the world of social media and PR, spending time and money
on journalists to line up business or product coverage of your launch,
only to find out that the product is delayed or has issues, can put the
business credibility in jeopardy . Journalists lose interest pretty
quickly and are never your friends.

Do Realistic CAC calculations

While
a business waits for SEO efforts to kick in, a business may utilise
Google Ad Words to drive traffic for (a) for lead generation or (b)
sales. Take a look at this example. The cost per click works out at 50
cents, the resulting 1000 website visitors converting to a trial rate of
5% (50) at a cost of €500. These 50 trials are then converting to paid
customers at the rate of 10% which is 5. So each customer is costing
€100 in just lead generation expense excluding sales/product/support
costs. For many companies in the B2C space or in the B2B space with
software using the web as their main acquisition channel, it can be hard
to get the consumer to pay more than €100 for the product or service

Many
business underestimate or do not budget for a realistic CAC, if we take
the above example the cost of customer acquisition can climb rapidly if
leads require a sales person to convert them. This human interaction
can be as simple as email follow ups right up to inside sales people
doing multiple sales calls and demos. Depending on the
trial/registration rate along with sales conversation rates the cost can
vary from €400 to over €5,000 per new customer acquired, depending on
the level of interaction needed.

Another
CAC calculation is to look at the cost of a field sales force. The
fully loaded cost of a field sales executive with travel, car, expenses
and salary can push the CAC into over €10,000 in enterprise sales.

In
trying to address the single most important early-stage question –
customer acquisition – it is easy to waste a lot of money in the wrong
channels and on the wrong customer acquisition tactics (lots of
companies in the graveyard from just this one failure), especially the
new companies that went  toe-to-toe with the big guys and can got blown
away.

Every business has to execute in a different way

A
business will only thrive by marketing and selling smart; acquiring
customers in an economic way and in a way that differentiates the
business from the crowd. To goal is to build a customer acquisition
strategy for paying customers the business does not have to keep paying
for every month.

Create Demand

In
larger companies with deeper pockets while the customer
acquisition isn’t exactly simple, they do have more resources. The
process of customer acquisition is more challenging for newer companies.
Established business’s will utilise bigger budgets, have greater brand
awareness, and an ever growing community of influencers. Most new
businesses will not launch with a partnership with an established brand
like Microsoft, Apple or Google where the demand for the product already
exists. Instead a new business has to allocate sales resources and
money wisely to fight (and a fight it is) to let potential customers or
audiences know that you exist, explain to them why they should show
interest, and initially even offering to go the extra mile by holding
their hand through the sales process.

The
focus of everyone in a new business is not only to create the brand but
also the demand. Sales and marketing are not two different
departments,  the person leading the marketing drive needs control spend
on brand marketing and really understand how to execute lead nurturing,
content marketing, web demand generation programs and work hard at
marketing efforts that require time but not money. Marketing and sales
need to work at the hip to generate a steady, growing stream of leads
each and every month.”

Acquiring new customers means understanding what makes your customers tick and
investing in inbound marketing strategies such as content and quality
articles, got onto the forums, become a subject matter expert and invest
in search engine optimization (SEO) as a longer term tactic.

The Business Model

Business model viability, in the majority of new companies, will come down to balancing two things:

Cost to Acquire Customers (CAC)

The ability to extract value from customers, or LTV (Lifetime Value of a Customer)

Web
based companies have long understood these metrics as they have a much
easier easy way to measure them. However there are huge benefits for all
businesses to look at these same metrics.

To
repeat the message from a few paragraphs back, to calculate the cost to
acquire a customer, CAC, a business needs to take the entire cost of
sales and marketing over a given period, including salaries and other
headcount related expenses, and divide it by the number of customers
that a business has acquired in that period.  (In pure web plays where
the headcount does not need to scale as customer acquisition scales, it
is also very useful to look customer acquisition costs with/without the
headcount costs.)

To
compute the Lifetime Value of a Customer, LTV, you would look at the
margin that you would expect to make from that customer over the
lifetime of your relationship. Margin should take into consideration any
support, installation, and servicing costs.

Manage Optimism with Reality

To
be in business requires huge optimism, and in a belief in how much
customers will want to buy your product. Unfortunately this can lead
businesses to believe that customers will be kicking down the doors to
purchase the product. This has the effect of grossly underestimating the
cost it will take to acquire customers. In too many companies there is
little or no focus on how much it will cost to acquire customers. Vague
strategies along the lines of social media marketing, and/or viral growth with no
numbers is not what you call business!

To
finish, a well thought out CAC plan outlines the need to acquire
customers through a series of steps like SEO, SEM, PR, Social Marketing,
direct sales, channel sales, etc. with the cost of each step worked
out. This planning brings honesty to the real cost of customer
acquisition.

Customer Acquisition Strategy – The Bitter Business

Lead Generation Software from Connectors Marketplace

When it comes to using lead generation software in the quest
for to speed up customer acquisition, we understand that every company
has different needs. That is why, when it comes to sales prospecting,
Connectors Marketplace offers you two options:


1) Self-Service Social Data

2) Automated Lead Generation Software


Our aim is to help your sales people to be as effective as possible
which means maximizing the time they spend actually talking to potential
customers. The buyer/customer journey has evolved rapidly in the past 3
to 5 years. Therefore, every business faces the difficult task of
finding and interacting with prospects to make the sales funnel move
faster with time poor buyers. Lead Generation tools and software
provides the data plus contact points (email address, telephone details
plus social profiles) to allow sales teams to focus their efforts on
acquiring new customers. According to a recent survey, over 35% of
business managers claimed that they lacked access to quality prospects.
Almost 50% said they wanted the number of sale leads to increase. The
lead Generation solutions from Connectors Marketplace solves these
challenges by automatically generating fresh and relevant leads for your
business.

Below are some benefits of using Lead Generation Software:

– Save’s you time identifing prospects

– Provides a continuous supply of verified leads

– Reduced cost-per-lead

– Targets quality prospects based on titles and profiles


So let me explain what each option from Connectors Marketplace provides:





Self-Service Social Data


This cost-efficient lead generation tool provides you with list after
list of social media prospects for you to search through. It allows you
to search by category and select keywords in order to find perfect
prospects for your business. You can then add these leads to your own
custom list. By providing you with each lead’s social media accounts,
you can search to find more detailed information much faster than
sourcing leads yourself. With Connectors Marketplace ‘Self-Service’
tool, prospect generation suddenly becomes a lot easier.


With a constant supply of leads, you have more time to focus on:


– Nurturing your leads

– Sharing and promoting content

– Building brand awareness

– Closing sale deals


Automated Lead Generation Service





This managed service does the hard work for you by providing you with
your most relevant and influential leads with detailed contact and
social information. We cater to your specific needs to make customer
acquisition as simple as possible. You tell us the type of prospects you
want to engage with, we’ll deliver the lists. With this service,
quality leads are just a phone call away. No more tedious effort in
trying to identify prospects or sourcing email addresses  because our
technology and data collection experts produce a continuous supply of
custom profiles and contact information based on social data. The goal
of Connectors Marketplace is to save you time so that you can focus more
of your energy on engaging with and nurturing relevant prospects.


In today’s world, it is essential for any marketing or sales strategy
to produce a continuous flow of leads. Even for small businesses the
need to constantly find new customers is a challenge. The sales and
marketing community needs a strong tool with the ability to filter all
social media jumble, posts, tweets, latest news, discussions and social
media profiles to identify new business opportunities.


But what makes Connectors Marketplace ‘Automated Lead Generation
Service’ different from any other lead generation service? There are
already tools that exist in the marketplace that can give you reports
about a company’s social media activity, however, Connectors Marketplace
provides actionable insights with complete drill down ability to
uncover, filter and segment sales opportunities across multiple social
networks in one place. Unique data research is conducted for each
company. This technology, combined with our own data scientists can
generate highly targeted and detailed customer information in such a way
that cannot be generated using our software alone. The detailed
information we provide of each relevant prospect makes our social data
more advanced which no other lead generation company can match.


So no matter which option is best for you, Connectors Marketplace
will make the whole customer acquisition process a whole lot easier.

B2B Marketing Strategies – The Bitter Business

In the world of B2B marketing strategies, CMO’s and marketing leads
are finding out that there is allot more to them than just content and
SEO.


Social media marketing companies seem to trot out the well worn lines
of, you must create a library full of content, recalibrate your SEO,
share the content on the social networks, and HEY PRESTO. Your business
will have a flow of low cost inbound leads from buyers interested in
buying your product or service. The logic around a content lead strategy
for lots of businesses stacks up as the lower cost of an inbound lead
against an outbound lead is sizeable, making it attractive to invest in
SEO, articles, blogging and content.





So it can be easy for any marketer to assume that we all use social
media. Most marketing people are active on the social networks as it
forms part of marketing tactics and we also have to be up-to-date on
latest trends. However, this is not the case for lots of senior business
people and buyers. I have worked with lots of CEO’s who do not have
profiles on LinkedIn or Twitter. Others in senior positions are not
actively engaged with social media to get a result on trying to build
awareness for your brand or even social selling tactics.


What lots of social media agencies will never tell you is that an
inbound strategy does not work for all market sectors and can be in fact
a waste of money, resources and time. For certain B2B companies
operating in certain markets or industries, the reality is the target
buyer audience can be too small or the products or services too
specialised to be worth over investing in SEO, Google Adwords or Content
Marketing. If your business is a new or disruptive product then maybe
buyers is not yet doing keyword searches on Google for the solutions you
sell.


You see most inbound marketing tactics try to hit multiple keywords
or topics to engage buyers. Most of these tactics really are inexpensive
to tee up and implement but the audience engagement is not an exact
science (you can’t stop anyone reading your articles). So it does take
some time to refine your tactics to narrow down sell-to leads.


When articles or blog posts are ranked in search engine results, the
relevancy to the topic is mainly down to the keywords it has been
optimised for. If your target is HR directors in the banking industry in
Ireland then content and even paid advertising cannot be specifically
targeted at them 9you cannot control who reads or clicks). There are
exceptions like social selling tools like LinkedIn or Connectors
Marketplace where you can specify buyer profiles.


Let me be clear, I am not for one second suggesting B2B marketers
should discount social media as part of their marketing strategy. The
thing to remember is to keep the purpose and goals in perspective, don’t
get carried away by stories, statistics and advice that may or may not
be relevant to your business proposition.


To make social media pay, you should:

• Evaluate the social platforms for their fit to your marketing goals

• Can you feed them with quality content and informative articles

• Train up the sales team in social selling so they can use social media to nurture relationships

So when does inbound marketing have limited returns?

• The buyer is a specific person within that company:
  If one buyer has the authority to purchase your product with little
  influence from other stakeholders as it is not a critical purchasing
  decision (e.g. paper) then it is a challenge to engage this person with
  inbound marketing alone.
• The target market is small: When the target
  prospects are defined by location, company size or a single buyer (see
  above) in a company, the list of prospects can be very small. My own
  rule of thumb is if your prospect list is less than 1000 companies then a
  heavily weighted inbound strategy may only be helpful to raise
  awareness as the buyer will probably be targeted via sales calls.
• Disruptive technology or products: Where inbound
  excels is when the buyer is on a journey of self discovery (reading
  articles, whitepapers or engaged with social conversations) and where
  they understand the problem and the solutions. When a product is
  disruptive in nature a business may have to create demand as few buyers
  will be seeking out information. Inbound marketing does NOT create
  demand, it harvest levels of buyer interest based on keyword nets thrown
  out by marketing content.

The reality is that for some companies, the keyword net on Google
searches and the social networks is simply too small to gather enough
sales leads. This leaves options like outbound sales and referrals to
harvest leads. We know referrals have a high conversion rate but this is
not a repeatable sales process. So this leaves outbound selling
(combined with social selling) makes for a repeatable, scalable sales
process.


As someone who champions inbound marketing, social selling and good
old fashioned sales techniques, I have to be frank and say if your
products or services meet any of the criteria I wrote about above, then
inbound marketing alone as a lead channel will have limited success. So
contrary to what lots of social media gurus preach, inbound marketing is
only part of the solution and it may not be a lead generation machine
to feed sales.

So what marketing and sales strategies will work?

Marketing and sales leaders spend endless hours asking and answering
this very question, “Where and how do we engage the right prospects?”
The good news is there are still lots of options when it comes to
reaching B2B prospects.


Embrace outbound prospecting: Hire in sales people
who can pick up the phone and prospect AKA cold call. A business can now
subscribe to automated lead generation platforms to give you large
lists of prospects based on titles, industry and location with full
contact details (email and telephone numbers) including social media
profiles for social selling engagement. This works great for SaaS
companies and companies with defined sales processes.


Still some life in events and trade shows: Attending
events can be another way to connect with your target prospects and
meet them in face-to-face. This can be a very personal approach that
creates trust and builds relationships. The big barrier  is that events
cost money, have higher cost per lead, take time to plan and are they
cannot scale in any major way.


Industry Webinars: If your own marketing reach is
too small to make hosting your own webinar an option, then maybe
consider trying to find a market research company, an industry
publication or forum or a contact where you can piggy bank on their
webinars to get access to their audience. It does take effort but can be
a great way to grow a prospect list while providing valuable content to
generate more awareness.


Customer Referrals: Some businesses do manage to
generate a large portion of their leads via customer referrals and word
of mouth. But a note of caution, this tactic is difficult to forecast
and scale. Also from a sales process, it is hard to have a programmatic
approach to word of mouth referrals. Even formal referral programs
usually have low level of leads in certain B2B sectors.


Exposure in publications: Online and print
publications are a B2B marketing channel worth exploring. Product
reviews, news and interviews can be a great way to reach an audience and
connect with prospects


We must all accept that the buyer’s journey is changing. Yes, social media marketing agencies
are right when they say business buyers are increasingly relying on
social media, social conversations, social reviews and other content as a
means of gathering information about vendor solutions. But regardless
of what B2B marketing strategy you pursue to generate leads or sales,
there is still a huge place for direct human contact via well trained
sales people. In the sales process there will always be a place where
questions will best be addressed in a personal way especially in higher
value deal sizes.



B2B Marketing Strategies – The Bitter Business

Should I Consider Automated Lead Generation for my Business?

If you are feeling the pressure to generate a greater volume of
relevant sales leads and achieve more valuable, in-depth knowledge about
your prospects with less time and money, don’t worry because so are
most sales leaders and marketers. Luckily, new technology has been
developed to combat this issue – automated lead generation
software. This tool has the capacity to produce a greater number of
quality sales leads and convert them into customers without sales people
having to do the tedious research and work themselves. 78% of
successful marketers claim that this automation technology is the number
one reason for their increase in revenue (Source: The Lenskold Group,
2013). So if you are looking to maximise your results from lead
generation and lead nurturing programs, an automated system is one of
the most advanced and efficient tools you can choose.


You would be surprised how under-utilized this software is among B2B
companies right now. This is most likely because sales/marketing
strategies and tools are constantly changing and upgrading in the
current digital world. Businesses will slowly realise that automated
lead generation is where we are headed. The fact is – companies that are
outgrowing their competitors are using lead automation software. The
question you should be asking yourself is ‘why is are my sales teams
doing all this tedious, time-consuming manual work when there are
automated tools to do this for them?’


Here, you will learn what automated lead generation is, how it works,
and what benefits you will see when implemented into your business.

What is Automated Lead Generation?

Automated lead generation refers to the software that has been
developed to automate sales and marketing actions like prospect
identification to save marketers and sellers a lot of time and energy,
which allows them to focus their efforts on other selling tasks. Just as
in marketing where they need to automate repetitive tasks such as
social media engagement, sending emails and other website actions,
automated lead generation does the same for sales related activities.
This technology time consuming tasks a lot simpler. Ideally, customer
automation is software that allows companies to identify, score and
nurture prospects while also providing assets like email addresses,
telephone numbers and social media profiles. This has the effect of
speeding up customer engagement and generates new revenue for
businesses, and creates a significant return on investment.





The 21^st century saw the emergence of the information age.
This new economy has replaced the old outdated lead generation
techniques which continues to be widely used today.


Those generating sales leads without an automation system will have to manually:

• Find relevant new leads with contact information
• Segment these sales leads according to interest and needs
• Prioritise and nurture these leads
• Qualify leads
• Make a report to measure success and sales conversion rate

A sales automation tool eliminates much of the manual hassle of these
tasks and will help you achieve results in an easy and efficient
manner. Known automation tools and services can be provided by
Connectors Marketplace, Socedo, and Unomy, to name only a few.
Businesses that do not adapt to the changes and capabilities of the
information age will be left behind.


How does it work?

Finding and Engaging with Social Prospects

A sales person can spend the bulk of their time (over 67%) and energy
simply trying to find relevant sales leads and interact with them.
Manually sifting through social networking sites is a rough job and
requires patient and consistent monitoring over a long period of time.
Lead automation software allows you to adjust custom criteria for
qualifying social prospects and begins engaging them with follow-up
actions.


As an example, you might be looking to find your target Twitter
prospects based on some business information and start conversing with
them. Twitter prospects are analysed according to their profile summary
and daily activities. It then conjures up a list of relevant leads based
on your custom profile type, such as construction workers, IT
professionals, etc. If you want to be more specific, you can choose to
further narrow your search by adding certain things to your search. This
can include trigger words in personal profiles or in tweets.


Thus, what you get is a pool of relevant and qualified Twitter
prospects in your sales pipeline based on your own search criteria, that
too at almost no effort. Such tool acts as a completely automated and
intelligent lead generation machine saving a considerable amount of man
hours.


Perhaps you are a company who wants to make a good first impression
with prospective clients. An automated B2B prospecting service allows
you to research professionals and companies and learn more in-depth
information about them easily and effectively. Such platforms give
marketers and sellers a greater volume of information about the company
overall, such as revenue rates, competitors, investments and employees.
This gives you a slight upper-hand when it comes to meeting with
prospects and making a good impression.


Unlike other lead generation services, Connectors marketplace
combines automation technology with human data scientists to produce
even richer data research for each business they work with. Data
collection professionals complement and enhance the data that was
efficiently automated by finding more in-depth information like recent
news about a company or a prospect’s business email.





Nurturing your Prospects


As soon as you know exactly who your social prospects are, you must
now prioritise and nurture these people. Except that you don’t have to
do this entirely manually either, you can customise a highly developed
auto-response mechanism. A tool can create a customizable workflow of
standard operations that you want to run for an approved prospect. The
process is simple. Simple, but essential. I would even claim that lead
nurturing is the pin that holds your entire integrated lead generation
strategy in place. You help the tool know your selected list of Twitter
prospects on an incremental basis and the tool will do the routine jobs
on behalf of you. Growing competition and tighter budgets means that
today’s marketers and sellers are expected to make the most out of every
single lead they achieve.


Look at this stage as continually ‘warming up’ your potential
buyers/customers over a time period of months, even years. You don’t
need them to be ready to purchase straight away, but it’s advantageous
to have them in your pipeline until they feel ready. This strategy is
designed to warm up sales prospects who:

• Have bought from you before, but are not necessarily ‘active’ customers now
• Have showed some level of interest or curiosity – but are not yet ready to purchase
• You spoke to previously during your list building calls
• Left their personal details through your site, but again, are not yet ready to purchase

Lead nurturing makes such a difference to sales outcomes that it can
make the difference between having a bad sales year and an amazing one.
During this time, you simply want to collect useful information that you
can use within your lead nurturing system. Did you know that a business
can roughly lose between 40% and 80% of prospects as they progress
through the pipeline because companies did optimise each stage of the
selling process? (Yankee Group Study). That is why consistent engagement
and social selling over a lengthy period of time is an extremely
important step in the selling process.


For example, many of these systems automate certain small social
selling activities like favouring tweets, following them up soon after
or messaging them personally for the follow back. Have an end goal in
sight for these types of operations. Perhaps your aim is to bring people
back to your website. Maybe you want to engage with your sales
executives.


Keeping Track of Prospect Activity and Conversions


You not only need to find new prospects but also view prospect
engagement report real-time. These social networking tools for analysis
help you to track, benchmark and optimize social media performance with
time. With the advanced functionalities of an automation tool, you can
add critical business insights to custom prospect generation criteria
and your engagement with social leads.


For example, automation systems allow you to track the number of
Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook prospects that have been followed up on
and how many have been missed because of lack of action.


With this useful tool you can create a lifetime prospect criteria report which records:

• The different trigger words you selected for filtering sales leads.
  This includes location keywords, conversational keywords and personal
  profile keywords
• The number of leads that match your keyword criteria
• The amount of prospects that have been qualified and followed up on
• How many leads made you a LinkedIn connection and followed you back on Twitter.

This report aids you in pin-pointing what selling strategies work and
don’t work for your company. Thus, allowing you to make improvements.

Summary of Automation Lead Generation Benefits

Companies that upgraded their lead generation strategy by investing
in automated lead generation software claim that the biggest benefits
are:

• Allowing marketers to focus on other tasks while the automated system carries out repetitive tasks for them
• Generating more valuable and qualified leads
• Creates a better buying experience for your customers
• Better management and nurturing of prospects
• Improved email marketing
• Reduces the chance of mistakes
• Multichannel marketing

Have you changed your mind about automated lead generation?
Studies are proving that marketing automation will be the future of the
sales process. The better targeted your approach with your clients, the
better your results will be. And while it might not be widespread in
companies now, automation software for sales prospecting and social
selling will certainly catch on as more and more businesses prosper with
it in the ever growing information era.



Should I Consider Automated Lead Generation for my Business?

Social Selling in the Digital World

You may have heard the phrase ‘social selling’ being thrown around
when discussions about the future of new business and sales methods
arise. It is common to hear social selling described as the secret
formula to business growth in the current digital world. And statistics
are proving it so. According to nearly 64% of people using social media
to sell experienced a significant growth in their business sales income.
This is in contrast to the near 42% of sales teams not using social
selling as part of their customer interaction. (Source: Sales for Life: The State of Social Selling.)


But you still might be scratching your head over what exactly social
selling entails and whether it is worth considering for your business.
Let me clarify things.

What Is Social Selling?

Social selling is making use of today’s popular social media
platforms including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest to add
strength and credibility to your business brand and connect with
potential buyers/customers, allowing them to interact with you, get to
know you, like you and eventually trust you. Once you have earned their
trust, it is up to you to sway these potential buyers into becoming
customers by making and closing the sale.


Buyers and customers main platform for research and communication is
now online. People have access to the internet everywhere, even in their
pocket. According to Forrester, 74% of B2B buyers carry out half of
their research online before even having a conversation with a sales
person. In today’s digital world it is crucial to have a social presence
online. Sharing valuable content, being educative and engaging gives
your brand a distinct advantage when potential buyers are doing their
research online. Businesses that wish to flourish need to make their
mark and stand out from the crowd. A company should aim to establish
itself as a leading authority in the industry. In order to amplify success and stay ahead of the competition, your business must adapt to the changing times.


Here are three things to remember when adopting a social selling approach into your sales process:

1. Research your prospects

Find out as much as possible about your potential customer, employee,
investor, co-founder, business partner or client. Building a
relationship with this person starts with knowing who they are.
The online world has developed an interesting culture where people are
more like to share (even over-share) details about themselves. We can
easily discover one’s current job, where they went to school, what they
are interested in… This makes it a lot easier to understand each
prospect you connect with.

2. Be Genuine

Start interacting with the people you want to have in your network.
Find things in common and use these to initiate conversation and make a
connection. Establishing friendships is simple when you are being
genuine. Authentically engage by responding to someone’s blog that you
truly enjoyed or make sure to congratulate a recently promoted prospect.

3. Prioritise and deepen your relationships

People want to invest in, work for and partner with professionals
they know and trust. Establish relationships; don’t bombard them with a
sales pitch. Nobody likes being pushed into buying something. Take
charity fundraisers for example. Even though you know they are raising
money for a good cause, it is usually off-putting to be stopped every
five minutes on a busy street to listen to a ten minute speech
convincing you to donate. This sales method is unpleasant for customers.
Social selling is about interacting with people in a disarming way. You
give them valuable content, solutions to their problems, and your
genuine personality. In return, they give you their trust and attention.
Nurturing relationships is a lengthy and patient process and calls for
authenticity at all times.


Adopting this method of selling has proven to generate around 40%
more qualified leads than a more traditional cold calling approach. On
top of that, you know you have made genuine connections. Following on
from that, a skilled social seller can achieve almost 90% success rate
when it comes to the next step of setting up that first face to face
meeting with a connection they have nurtured.


 What Is Not Social Selling?


It is not enough to simply have social networking accounts to make your business look
social and grab SEO traffic. It is important for sales teams and
managers to realise is that simply having these new age tools is not
going sell their product or service. They still need to sell it.


Social Selling is a lot of work and requires patience and consistency
over a significant period of time. I must stress – social selling is
not easy. Building a globally visible, digitally based personal brand
can seem like a daunting task to take on. Then you must research and
engage with executives, decision makers and influencers on a ‘social’
level which takes time and skill. It is far from easy.


Your company will not succeed in social selling if you do not
reassess and modernise the way you sell. Your sales strategy and your
sales process need to evolve with it. For social selling to work
effectively, the training, the process and the sales performance of the
people are what’s most important.  It is about prioritizing a
sharing mind-set over a selling mind-set – even if a sales transaction
seems like a sure thing from the start. Rather than thinking of selling
and sharing as two different things, it is the nature of sales activity
that is changing thanks to social selling. To put it plainly, finding
prospects is now less about pitching and more about convincing clients
through the sharing of information and expertise.


A Whole New Set of Capabilities


Today’s modern and successful businesses do not make money with
social networking sites, they make money with prospects who know, like
and trust them. Social media is a tool that has opened up a whole new
level of relationship building possibilities with buyers and customers.
Only when a relationship has developed will they buy from you. Social
Selling represents a change in how sellers find and engage with buyers
in the digital age. A new set of sales capabilities have arisen:

• Sales teams can build greater networks
• Ability to find buyer conversations faster
• Easier to share content with prospects and buyers
• Simpler to find information about companies and contacts
• Changed the way sales establish and maintain relationships
• Prospect engagement have moved from in-person to digital
• Increased number of channels Customers can access touch points

This proves that new technology has opened up a lot of doors for how
we can engage with prospects, build relationships and influence buyer
decisions. It has allowed for effective social selling. However, we must
not forget that social selling is still selling. It is selling in the digital era. See Social Selling Tips.
Without it, a company will see no improvement. Businesses are still
selling to their customers, the difference now is that there is greater
opportunity to find and develop connections with prospects than there
ever has before. Social selling is proving to be a strong weapon in the
sales process among the B2B companies who have implemented it
successfully. However, the number of sales teams leveraging social
selling is still quite small. The ones who are – and
implementing it in a tactical way – are seeing significant results that
will surely compel the stragglers to catch up quickly.



Social Selling in the Digital World | Lead Generation and Social Selling Articles and News

Online sales lead generation

About us

Automated Sales Lead Generation

November 2015





CONNECTORS goes to market with an automated sales
lead generation web service. The service gives sales and marketing
teams instant access to real-time sales leads and influencers on social
media. CONNECTORS is helping SMB's in the tech sector have instant
access to 50 social media leads per sales rep per day.

January 2015





CONNECTORS commercial team located at Park
Avenue, New York City to service the North American market with an
automated sales lead generation data service. The data science research
and development team is located at the NovaUCD innovation and technology
transfer center at University College Dublin.

October 2014





CONNECTORS founder and CEO Kevin Neary appointed a
senior management team and on the back of extensive research applied
concepts from advanced predictive analytics to automate the
identification predictive scoring of sales leads across a variety of
sources: social networks, online magazines and newspapers.

CONNECTORS Background





CONNECTORS started out in 2013 as a crowd
sourcing marketplace for employers to identify brand influencers. The
model evolved to support both employer and consumer brands and over time
CONNECTORS positioned as an Automated Social Media Lead Generation web
service.

Our Team

Automated Sales Lead Generation

Contact us

Automated Sales Lead Generation

Online sales lead generation

Free Trial User Guide | Lead Generation and Social Selling Articles and News

Free Trial User Guide | Lead Generation and Social Selling Articles and News



Download the Connectors marketplace users guide to help you during
your free trial on our social media lead generation and social
prospecting tool.

Taking Advantage of Free Sales Leads

Click here to download the Lead Generation User Guide





The best advice for all our new customers is just go ahead and start,
do not be afraid to make some mistakes as it takes time to refine your
ideal prospect or target list. Not every prospect identified will be
perfect from scratch. It is commonplace for a trial user to target a
very specific set of profiles at the beginning, however as you refine
and investigate other profiles you many find that the perfect prospects
are somewhat different.

We are adding new social networks every month and new social data everyday!

Let us take an example, your company is offering HR tech solutions so
you would set up a list within your account to target VP of HR because
they are the highest up the decision ladder for everything HR in the
company. But maybe connecting or social selling to the HR manager could
result in a much success rate, as the decision makers at these levels
are the ones most likely tasked with finding solutions to improve their
HR functions.


The Connectors Marketplace free trial is a risk free way to explore
the right set of profiles to sell to and also to give you insights into
social network activity for target keywords. As with all new sales and
marketing tools, getting to grips with a new source of sales leads can take some time to perfect.
In the beginning, most users go wide to grab quantity but for real
sales success they start refining the target criteria to focus in on
higher priority leads. By the end of the trial, you should have a sense
of the prospects you can target and decide to engage with maybe by
following on twitter, connecting on LinkedIn, joining same groups,
social selling or maybe even phoning them.  The set of results from the
trial will then help determine the expected flow of data into your
account over the next few months.

Let Us Help Set up and Refine Your Account

Connectors marketplace only succeeds if you succeed. We are here to
set up your keywords,lists and generally assist  in any way that we can.
Please, always feel free to ask for help. We have a team of social
media trained advisers to answer any questions and provide training free
of charge. In a short space of time (following 2 years research and
building the technology platform) we now have may satisfied customers
and everyday we help tons of trial users- just like you. We also use our
platform for our own sales process so we have lots of information and
data to share based on actual activity that could save time in sourcing
leads. If you need to contact us, we are available on the phone, email
or directly through the Connectors Marketplace dashboard.


Click here to download the free user guide: Lead Generation User Guide

Tips to Improve Your Sales Process | Lead Generation and Social Selling Articles and News

Tips to Improve Your Sales Process | Lead Generation and Social Selling Articles and News



Any company’s sales process has to evolve but with the rapid change
in the buyer’s journey many sales leaders are finding the processes need
to go through a fine tune. A good builder relies heavily on the
architect. They provide the expertise to make a building strong and
beautiful. In addition, they have defined steps in the building process
for the builder to follow to ensure it gets built according to
specification.


When something goes wrong, they can work together to determine what
did not go according to plan and what needs to be improved. This process
plays a critical role in construction projects all over the world.


Selling or sales should work in a similar way. Every business or
sales team usually have a defined sales process (formal or informal)
they follow to make sure they are successful. But what happens when
sales slow or the rate of customer acquisition declines?


Maybe the buyer and the buyer’s journey are different from the buyer
the original sales process was created for. As buyer habits evolve in
selecting vendors maybe your process needs to evolve too?


Here are some signs that your sales process may need tuning and some suggestions on what you can do to give it a boost.





Rely too heavily on cold leads.


The major obstacle to scaling a business is the over reliance on cold
leads and a lack of warm leads entering the sales pipeline. In the more
traditional selling model, agents had to rely on bought in data or
lists to generate leads, or more likely source cold prospects from
social networks like LinkedIn based on their titles rather than some
expression of interest. These increasingly ineffective sales strategies
have the effect of slowing down the sales process and extending the
sales cycle. Why? Because agents are doing “interruption selling”, that
is trying to sell to prospects that have never expressed any
consideration of engaging with your company, they might not even be
aware of your company. So these cold calls are fighting the tide of
buyer non interest in your product (in fact they may not even need or
benefit from what the agent is selling).

Sales process is about better ways of selling and making sales peoples efforts more productive

Would not a more productive process be for the agents to engage
prospects based on what they do, not who they are. Let me expand this
out further, who do you think is closer to considering a purchase, a
buyer who has never visited your company’s website, never read one of
your blogs and has no idea who you are, but has the title “CEO” on their
LinkedIn profile or a purchasing manager who has liked some of your
articles and checked out your LinkedIn profile in the past few days?
Well?


CRM tools and lead generation tools can make agents life a lot easier
and can be a critical tool in identifying buyer interest. For inbound
marketing tools like Hubspot and Marketo are great, for CRM and pipeline
management try Pipedrive, for automated lead generation try Connectors
Marketplace.


Poor prospect connect rates.


As much as we might fight it, the reality is cold calling is
declining fast. Interruption marketing and selling has lost its place in
the pecking order to acquire new customers. Studies show that now only
approx. 2% of cold calls result in a meeting. And it takes up to 8
attempts to get to speak to the prospect!! If agents are making 800
calls, talking to 100 prospects and only securing 2 meetings, that might
suggest a malfunction in the sales process.


Think Social Selling. Sharing great articles and using these to
developing rapport and engagement with a prospect online before reaching
out is maybe a step in the sales process companies should consider.
Armed with articles and white papers, agents can identify where
prospects hang out online then engage buyers in social conversations,
have constructive debates based on content shared, and gradually begin
to add value. This means that when the agent tries to connect on
LinkedIn or makes that call their name will be familiar to the buyer,
leading to far higher response rates.





Provide “Value Touches”.


Anyone who just sends out email after email of worthless follow up
emails are most likely wasting everyone’s because in today’s digital
world, buyers seek out value (awareness and consideration phase in
buyers journey) from the seller. When a potential customer receives
constant “just touching base” emails, they fail to see a return on the
time they are being asked to invest and statistics prove they most
likely will not respond.


Smart sales agents will focus on providing value in the form of
relevant content and materials to the prospective buyer as well as
guiding them (not interrupting them) through their individual buying
journey on their timeline. There are numerous ways to provide value in
email and social media communication such as case studies, customer
reviews, market research or mutual interests.


Every buyer has a deciding point, when they either consider or
discount your product. So bearing this in mind, make sure each and every
customer touch provides value.


A great source of new customers is from existing ones.


This is a well worn sales tip but never goes out of fashion. Ensure
sales agents are proactive with engaging with existing customer
database. Being proactive means soliciting feedback and staying in
regularly contact which pre-empts any issues. By engaging with customers
often and ensuring that all is OK, sales people can build a level of
trust that leads to the customer staying a customer.


Next, enlist existing customers help to generate leads. A referral
program when implemented correctly as part of the sales process can
bring a steady flow of warm leads, which we know close at higher rates
and quicker than cold prospects.


Any sales team is only as strong as the sales process they work with.
As the modern buyers journey changes, so does a company’s sales
process. The sales rules are being rewritten and a new way of selling is
emerging. Businesses and agents who focus on building relationships,
sharing, educating, utilizing social selling and guiding their prospects
and customers are moving clear of the chasing pack in winning more
sales.