lead generation Archives - Beasley Direct and Online Marketing

How the Great Resignation is Damaging Your B2B Demand Generation Campaigns—and What to Do About It

Laurie Beasley — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 15:00:18 +0000

According to the Labor Department’s Job Opening and Labor Turnover Survey the number of people leaving their jobs in September 2021 hit an all-time high of 3%. That was a record-breaking month, piggybacking on previous record months. “The Great Resignation” is real, and it can be seen across virtually all industries. To add insult to that employment injury, recent statistics have shown that one-third of new employees are quitting after about six months. ⁽¹⁾

This high employee turnover is not only a headache for employers, but also a big concern for B2B marketers trying to reach decision makers in companies who aren’t there anymore! Some may have dismissed the “Great Resignation” as only a problem in entry level positions in retail or entertainment, but it is reaching far into high tech, healthcare, and manufacturing and squarely at middle management and above, where the majority of B2B demand generation campaigns are targeted.

How the Great Resignation Could Have a Devastating Effect on Your Demand Generation Campaigns—But You Can Start to Fix this Now

This will begin to negatively affect your B2B demand generation campaigns in several ways:

With increasingly poor email deliverability, from bounced (undeliverable email addresses).
Wasted sales team efforts in trying to follow up on leads that are no longer at the company.
Disrupted decision making teams in companies. You could have been close to a sale in an account and voila 2 of the 5 key decision makers have left. You will need to navigate into the company all over again in a few months to find out who the new decision makers are.

All of the issues above are reflections of B2B data quality issues created by this unprecedented employee turnover. These data quality issues will begin to negatively affect the number of marketing and sales qualified leads you have in your marketing automation system, and maybe even the open opportunities in your CRM. It could have a devastating effect on your sales pipeline for the next two quarters if efforts are not taken to stop the data hemorrhage now.

How to Fix the B2B Demand Generation Problems Caused by the Great Resignation

The first step in addressing the problem is to acknowledge there are significant financial risks to not addressing it immediately. The second step is to recognize it will take marketing budget to fix it. In my experience, marketing data cleansing has been the most underfunded aspect of marketing. There always seems to be lots of shinier marketing tech stack things to spend marketing budget on, rather than good quality data.

I recommend several steps be taken immediately:

Analyze the data deprecation rate (ie the rate at which you are getting email hard bounces, etc). This will give you a sense of how fast your company database is aging and help you to talk to vendors about how much data cleansing you need on a monthly basis.
Get help. Bring vendors on board who can interface with your CRM and continually cleanse your marketing data.
Get more help. Cleansing your current data isn’t enough to keep up and probably not enough to keep ahead of your demand generation goals. Your database will fall behind if all you do is try to correct your current data. People are moving jobs at too quick of a pace. You are going to need to identify, profile, and target key accounts more aggressively than ever before.
Have a strategy to reach remote workers. 74 percent of workers say that having a remote work opportunity would make them less likely to leave a company, and 64 percent of recruiters report that being able to pitch a work-from-home policy helps them find high-quality talent.⁽²⁾They are an elusive bunch that are hard for data companies to find their email addresses and even harder to find their phone numbers. You need to get them to come to you with very good content programs. Use content networks to your best advantage, test using social media advertising on networks such as LinkedIn, and by all means optimize your SEO so that when they’re looking for a solution on their own, they’ll find you.

We predict you’ll need to spend a higher proportion of your marketing budget on data cleansing, content programs and SEO than you ever have in past years to keep up with your target’s job changes and lure them to find you. Hopefully what you’ll find on the prospect’s side is happier employees who will stay at their next job for a while, but maybe not, so keep the data cleansing going!

Need help with your b2b list or SEO? Contact us!

Written by Laurie Beasley

¹ “19 Employee Retention Statistics That Will Surprise you (2021)”; Apollo Technical; July 30, 2021; https://apollotechnical.com/employee-retention-statistics/

² Steward, Jack; “The Ultimate List Of Remote Work Statistics for 2021”; Findstack; September 21, 2021; https://findstack.com/remote-work-statistics/

The post How the Great Resignation is Damaging Your B2B Demand Generation Campaigns—and What to Do About It appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Teleprospecting Lists

BDM Super — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 23:01:52 +0000

Teleprospecting Lists

We provide contact lists to our clients who are running multi-touch, demand generation campaigns and also to marketers who rent telemarketing lists on an ad-hoc basis. In both cases, the most important consideration for you as the telemarketing list buyer should be the quality of the contact information and buying interest.

Because using the telephone is more expensive than other forms of marketing, you can’t afford to put up with bad data. Yet corporate mobility is a reality of today’s economy, so we work hard to find lists that have been validated for accuracy of the prospect’s title and company identity. That makes it easier to find the right person or to be redirected if they’ve changed position.

We offer compiled telemarketing lists that are verified for currency and correctness that will get you into the C-suites of top companies in your marketplace. A Beasley telemarketing list can put you in touch with mid-level buying influencers who have expressed interest in learning about products like yours through their answers to surveys or other polling methods. And if needed we can create a custom list to fit a particular requirement, or update your own list with the latest names and titles. Call a Beasley telemarketing consultant today.

SPECIAL OFFER:
Get a Free Reverse Sales Funnel Analysis!

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Teleprospecting

BDM Super — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 21:21:35 +0000

Teleprospecting

SPECIAL OFFER:
Get a Free Reverse Sales Funnel Analysis!

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Lead Generation Services

BDM Super — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 20:03:52 +0000

Lead Generation Services

Companies selling complex or high-ticket products and services need a steady stream of qualified leads. Where do those leads come from? In a typical scenario, they’re generated and nurtured over an extended period which reflects the long sales cycle.

Beasley, a demand generation agency, can help you generate initial response through a relevant message and appealing offer, then condition your leads with multiple touches that might combine several different media including email, direct mail and phone. The prospect becomes more educated, and hopefully more ready to buy, as time goes on.

Through demand generation we also help “nurture” your sales force. Sales professionals become demoralized when they are provided leads that are poorly qualified to begin with, and their priorities might keep them from staying in contact with any but the best leads. Through marketing automation, we can give you a turnkey system for bringing along all your A, B and C leads so the best get the attention they deserve—but even the marginal prospects get repeated touches, delivered automatically and at low cost, that keep them informed and can move them up the quality ladder. It’s a best practices formula which has worked for many demand generation marketers in a diverse range of industries. Start increasing your leads today by hiring the best demand generation agency, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

SPECIAL OFFER:
Get a Free Reverse Sales Funnel Analysis!

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing has exceeded our expectations with our meeting maker campaign. The ROI results continue to impress my sales team with quality MQLs that turn into real opportunities. Their team is collaborative with innovative ideas and always quick to respond. I would highly recommend Beasley if you’re looking for a top-notch agency.

— James Barry – Director of WW Channel Programs – Digital Shadows

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Demand Generation

wpadmin — Tue, 11 Aug 2015 21:34:48 +0000

Demand Generation

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing came to my attention as a recommendation from a co-worker. From the outset, I was impressed by their creativeness, innovative problem-solving, and knowledge of best practices. Beasley Direct truly became a member of our team. They handled every stage of the project with organization skill and industry expertise that ensured our programs succeeded at the highest level. If your organization has need for demand generation, I highly recommend Beasley Direct.

— Stephanie Jerris, Global Campaign & Demand Gen Sr Manager – Veritas

Lead Generation Strategies

Beasley’s campaign lead generation strategies involve 11 important steps, which are described in detail in our hands-on guide, Why It Takes 7 to 13 Touches to Generate a Qualified Sales Lead available in our resources section. Here’s a quick summary of the steps:

Plan with the Perfect Customer in Mind
Clearly Define a “Sales-Ready Qualified Lead”
Quantify your “Sales-Ready” Lead Quota
Align Sales, Marketing and Management with Your Lead-to-Sale Plan
Segment Your Target Markets
Improve Target Prospect Data
Make Your Offer Compelling
Tell a Story with Your Content
Send an Email or Direct Mail as First Touches
Listen to Prospects and Engage with the Human Touch of a Phone Call
Track All Touch Metrics

As you can see, with lead generation strategies it’s important to decide what you want in a prospect and how many you need before you ever start planning creative and building a schedule for contacts. The definition of a “sales-ready lead” should come from Sales, not Marketing, and typically describes their business needs, their buying responsibility and the time frame for their purchase.

The job of a lead generation company is to attract the attention of these potential prospects and deliver them to the client’s sales force. Timing is particularly important: if they’re willing to talk to your sales rep at the beginning, you may be able to influence the specs for their purchase; if you wait until they’ve already made a list of vendors, then you have lessened your chance of winning. Through multiple touches, you can build awareness of your solution, so when the time is right for the first live sales contact it will be an easy transition.

Your campaign’s lead generation strategies can be planned internally, as long as you don’t miss any steps. However, we recommend you engage Beasley, a seasoned and professional lead generation company, at the beginning so we can advise on the right way to handle your evolving lead at each step on their journey to the signed purchase order.

Marketing Lead Funnel Audit

We’ve found through the marketing audit process there are three typical scenarios that cause leads to “leak” from your sales funnel.

First, prospects may research a product in many different ways, keeping you guessing on how to intersect with them at the right point in the marketing funnel purchase process. Prospects progress from awareness to consideration to purchase. It’s your job as a marketer to provide them with the right information at the right time in the marketing funnel and try to steer them to a purchase and qualify the ones who are ready to buy earlier in the process.

Second, as we’ve mentioned it can take 7 to 13 touches to qualify a prospect. The salesperson might give up and decide the lead is not interested after 2 or 3 touches, while the prospect isn’t ready to buy until touches 10-13. You need to execute on all the touches needed to deliver all of the qualified prospects available in a target list or segment.

Third, the sales department will only follow up on leads it feels meets certain criteria for Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe (BANT). However most marketing automation systems are imperfect in their scoring and rely heavily on landing page submissions to assess a prospect’s readiness to speak to a salesperson. This means a lot of leads get stuck in the middle of the marketing funnel with no way to progress.

The marketing audit process can tell you what is happening at each step in the demand waterfall lead-to-revenue sales process, and identify points at which you are losing prospects because you’re not giving them what they need at that moment. You can then support the sales department by filling in these leaks to continue nurturing leads toward the “sales-ready” stage.

In the Beasley marketing audit process we’ll typically interview your sales team, review your existing lead funnel and marketing automation process, and then make a detailed recommendation for improvement. Keep in mind that an effective multi-touch campaign will almost always include email, direct mail and teleprospecting and Beasley can provide any missing components, or execute your entire campaign.

Content Syndication Services

Content Syndication Services, also known as Content Distribution or a Guaranteed Leads Program (GLP) is an alternative way to fill the top of your sales funnel. Instead of running your own programs for business lead generation, you can ask Beasley lead generation services to bring you prospects generated through white papers or webinars that are promoted on the networks of reputable publishers.

There are a few caveats to this “sounds too good to be true” lead generation proposition. You need to define your business lead generation requirements very specifically to be sure there’s a good fit. These leads may not be familiar with your specific product, even though they’ve expressed a buying interest in a solution like yours, so you’re likely to work harder to qualify them. The qualification process will likely involve a teleprospecting call to further gauge their appropriateness and interest.

Because there are lots of questionable players in content syndication services and the distribution sphere, we recommend you let an experienced lead generation agency like Beasley to help you navigate to the best content networks and avoid the pain of paying for leads that aren’t valuable to your sales department.

Lead Qualification/Teleprospecting

Teleprospecting is very different from what consumers think of as “telemarketing”, because our objective is to identify qualified leads who welcome our calls and will be happy to talk to our sales team. As a professional telemarketing management company, we do lead qualification through a methodical process that starts with training the people on the phone. We want them to be respectful of their prospect’s time and knowledgeable about our client’s product or service.

Typically a teleprospecting call is part of a multi-touch campaign, following up on qualified leads that are an inbound prospect or an outbound email or direct mail contact. The telephone agent can repeat the offer and describe its benefits and often succeeds in converting a recipient to a qualified lead who shares intent-to-buy and timing. The agent can also probe about the prospect’s pain points or objections and offer a response that moves the sales process along.

We also use teleprospecting as a tool to fill in the gaps in your database when you are missing important information about qualified leads. A polite call from a professional-sounding individual can get answers that are not available any other way, and save both the prospect’s and the sales team’s time going forward in the sales process.

At Beasley, a telemarketing management company, we look at the telephone not as an annoyance, but as a premium enhancement when you want to do everything possible to ensure the success of a campaign. The more we know about the prospect’s needs, the better job we can do of filling them through your message.

Telemarketing Lists

Email & Marketing Operations

Beasley is well versed on executing emails on sending platforms including Marketo, ExactTarget, and Silverpop. As part of our email and marketing operations services we can work seamlessly within your existing platform, or help you choose and get set up on a new platform including loading your data, setting up subscriber preferences, lead scoring, engagement engines, building complex nurture funnels, revenue engines, creating email templates, and integrating email marketing software with your CRM or sales automation system.

We also offer ad hoc email marketing services in which we create your emails and load your lists for transmission internally on your platform. At client request, we can play the role of your email sending staff or place a contract programmer at your facility to help strategize and implement the email campaign calendar. In short, we can do whatever it takes to get your email delivered without a hitch.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing can you help you on the following email and marketing automation platforms:

Marketo is a robust B2B marketing automation platform which hosts your email campaigns and landing pages and allows for complex lead scoring and nurturing. Our email programmers are Marketo Certified Experts.

SalesForce Marketing Cloud/ExactTarget is email marketing software used primarily for consumer email campaign management. Beasley is an ExactTarget Silver Partner. We are also experts in AMPscript, a proprietary ExactTarget scripting language that can be embedded within HTML emails, text emails, landing pages, and SMS messages. The system processes the script at the point where you include it in the message to render content on a subscriber-by-subscriber basis. This allows for highly personalized email messages that populate relevant data based on the subscriber’s preferences and behavior.

Act-On is a marketing automation solution designed to meet the needs of the small and mid-sized business, and the smaller marketing teams often working inside big enterprises. The Act-On platform is loaded with powerful cutting-edge capabilities, and we can help you implement Act-On in days rather than weeks. We can also help you integrate with other tools and your sales or customer automation platforms.

Silverpop provides flexible email marketing services used by both B2B and B2C companies. It includes an email sending service, behavior marketing, and marketing automation platform.

Need help choosing a service? We’ll be happy to advise you. The biggest factor is the level of personalization, data integration and dynamic content required. For B2B, lead scoring and nurturing capabilities are also important features we’ll help you evaluate.

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Join Laurie Beasley, Co-Founder and President, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., in a Workshop on “New ‘Meeting Maker’ Tactics for Marketers to Get and Schedule Appointments for the Sales Team” at Women In Consulting’s® South Bay Satellite

Andy Hoover — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 19:35:58 +0000

Laurie Beasley Speaking on New “Meeting Maker” Tactics at Women in Consulting’s® South Bay Satellite.

Laurie Beasley, Co-Founder and President of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., will be teaching a live “Meeting Maker” workshop at Women in Consulting’s® South Bay Satellite.

New “Meeting Maker” Tactics for Marketers to Get and Schedule Appointments for the Sales Team

(Monday, February 11, 2019. 11:30 AM to 1:00 PM Pacific Standard Time)
Learn more

Once you’ve built your target company and contact list, you then need to get your prospects to engage in a sales discussion. However, it can take 7-21 marketing touches for a prospect to develop into a sales lead…and to schedule that first meeting. Why? Because your prospect needs to wrap their head around your value proposition before they will be willing to spend time in a meeting of any kind.

The 7-21 touches can feel like a very long road to most marketers who are being held to very high expectations by the sales VP and the CFO. However, you can accelerate this process by integrating higher engagement tactics, such as direct mail and high touch tele-prospecting into the sequence for what we call “Meeting Maker” campaigns. We will discuss extensive case studies on “meeting maker” and sales “door-opener” campaigns. In one case study, a combination of direct mail, a fantastic offer, multiple email touches and tele-prospecting touches delivered 230 demo appointments out of a list 1,300 contacts for a major enterprise backup software company.

Key takeaways:

What multi-touch strategies to deploy and in what order
How to decide on a fantastic offer
Why direct mail is the account based marketer’s new secret weapon
The role of telemarketing in the multi-touch methodology
You’ll see extensive case studies with results and live samples you can view

Learn more

About Laurie Beasley

Laurie B. Beasley is co-founder and president of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., which provides services in inbound and outbound marketing including: content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, marketing automation management, and database management for both B2B and B2C companies. Ms. Beasley serves as president and online marketing certification instructor for the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California. She also speaks on online marketing and demand generation topics for several marketing organizations, including the DMA, BMA, and AMA. Learn more.

About Women in Consulting®

Women In Consulting® (WIC) is a community of professional women that helps each other build strong businesses. Our strengths lie in our interactions and collaborations with each other, and in our professional educational programs.

WIC members are known for generously sharing best practices, expertise, advice and resources, and for working together on projects. In the process, we expand our capabilities, accelerate our learning, and smooth the path to successful businesses.

We’re a premier resource for businesses seeking industry experts to deliver high-quality results. Although many members get business through WIC, we’re not a leads group. We’re much more than that, with educational programs and a community of smart, savvy women who rely on each other for personal and professional advice and support. Learn more.

For help developing and implementing a Meeting Maker campaign, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., can help! Get a free consultation.

Find more case studies and white papers at https://beasleydirect.com/resources/case-studies/.

The post Join Laurie Beasley, Co-Founder and President, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., in a Workshop on “New ‘Meeting Maker’ Tactics for Marketers to Get and Schedule Appointments for the Sales Team” at Women In Consulting’s® South Bay Satellite appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Join Laurie Beasley, President of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., in a Live Online Advanced Demand Generation and Lead Conversion Workshop

Laurie Beasley — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 03:39:04 +0000

Advanced Demand Generation Training and Lead Conversion Training.

Laurie Beasley, President of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., will be teaching a live online demand generation workshop for the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California.

Enroll in the recorded online workshop here.

In this session, we’ll look at how to make a comprehensive demand generation go-to-market plan. Discover the best list building and augmentation tactics. Learn how to approach lead scoring and nurturing. How to make marketing automation work for you and not the other way around. Finally, we’ll discuss how to optimize each inbound and outbound marketing channel for B2B. Lots of case studies will be included in the course to support key points.

What you’ll learn:

Making the go-to-market plan
Demand generation list strategies
Tools for determining buyer intent
Lead scoring best practices
Optimizing lead nurturing
How to make marketing automation work for you (and not the other way around)
What PPC, SEO and Social Strategies work best
How to optimize Email, Direct Mail and Telemarketing

Learn more.

About the DMAnc (www.DMAnc.org)

The DMA of Northern California was formed to educate, inform and provide networking opportunities for Direct and Online Marketing professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We hold monthly luncheon meetings, workshops, periodic half-day seminars, and provide opportunity for the best in learning and job networking in the Northern California marketing community.

About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. We provide services in inbound and outbound marketing including: content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. We help clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and are privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go here.

Get a FREE Lead Funnel Audit. Learn more here.

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Four “Meeting Maker” Case Studies Detail Techniques to Snag More Demos and Sales Appointments

Jan Carroza — Tue, 10 Jul 2018 19:57:58 +0000

Case Studies Detail Techniques to Snag More Demos and Sales Appointments.

Meeting Maker Campaigns generate qualified leads that win awards for results!

To realize the best ROI, companies with big-ticket products and services not only want to improve their sales conversions, but also need to shorten their lead-to-sales cycle. Our team understands these special lead nurturing requirements so well that we’ve named these programs “Meeting Maker Campaigns”. Each project entails a painstaking process to recognize problems, plan, coordinate, test, monitor, analyze, tweak, re-test and repeat. It sounds like a lot of activity, and it is, but it is so worth the effort.

We’ve had the pleasure to drive projects and achieve some spectacular results several times greater than the original goals, earning many DMA ECHO and other awards for results as well as creativity. We share highlights of our extensive experience with hundreds of campaigns for technology, financial, healthcare, business and high-end consumer goods and services in the Resources portion of this site.

4 Examples of Meeting Maker Campaign Strategies

Here’s a brief look at four remarkable examples that demonstrate our distinct strategic approach to capture more qualified leads, consequently speeding up sales closes with Meeting Maker Campaigns.

Choreographing intricate lead flow crushes goals by over 1000%!

To deliver qualified leads, this elaborate program started with a dimensional direct mail door opener that drove actions on a landing page to sign up for a demo. Emailings followed next, then outbound telemarketing and finally responders. The results and creative strategy of this campaign won an International ECHO Award. Click here to get lead generation ideas from this chronicle.

Face-to-face with “warmed-up,” qualified leads campaign hits 167% of goal

Understanding the target was critical to create the right appeal for Anritsu. Our multi-touch campaign used another dimensional direct mail package with a special offer, which led to a white paper download. Read the full details to see how we generated $2.8 million in sales in just three months.

Appointment-setting multi-touch, multichannel campaign yields $2.5 million

PPC advertising, trade shows and email weren’t hitting sales goals for an industrial glove corporation. Telemarketing lead prospecting and qualification coupled with list and offer testing made the difference. Click to see how we used best practices to solve the revenue problem with just 4.28 average touches, instead of the usual 7-13 communications.

Messaging, tele-prospecting and timed follow-up narrow lead-to-sales gap

When a wide-area network software optimization company came to BDOM for help with qualification and neglected potential leads, we began by looking at the difficulty to get the attention of their IT professional target. We also reviewed their current activities, which were already wide-ranging, but had no process for lead qualification.

Learn how BDOM diagnosed problems, tested lists and creative, spun on a dime to tweak and execute a campaign which cut down the competitor’s market share. We created a coordinated dance of messaging, telemarketing lead qualification and sales team follow-up with enticing content that continues successfully today.

If you’d like to explore creative opportunities to address your lead generation, sales conversion and quality issues, reach out. BDOM’s team enjoys a good challenge. Contact us to brainstorm multi-touch, multichannel methods, such as dimensional direct mail and lead generation and qualification through telemarketing, to hit your target goals.

Get started with a free marketing reverse sales lead funnel audit. Contact us for a free consultation!

Find more case studies and white papers at https://beasleydirect.com/resources/white-papers

By Jan Carroza, VP of Business Development and Account Management, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

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Diagramming Your Customer Lifecycle to Turbo-charge Sales

Laurie Beasley — Sun, 22 Apr 2018 06:31:22 +0000

Discover New Sales Opportunities Using Customer Lifecycle Diagramming to Identify Customer Needs.

Customer lifecycle diagramming can help you narrow your sales conversion gap and extract more sales per customer visit, more referrals and more total sales. Examination of a buyer’s experience may turn up weaknesses that can be fixed with just a few tweaks, yielding exciting results. Just a little time and effort spent in diagramming can make a significant impact on lead nurturing, customer acquisition, retention strategies and in enhancing touch point sequences that delight customers, leading to greater revenue.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, describes the compelling reason visitors pay repeated, sustained attention to a concept, brand or its products as The Stickiness Factor. When companies strive to provide a great customer experience and thought leadership, the effect is a boost in customer satisfaction, sales and internal morale. In other words, customers will “stick” with your brand.

Substantial, Sustainable Benefits

The benefits of a customer lifecycle deep-dive will strengthen your lead generation and nurturing campaign strategy and help you explore new sales opportunities. You will be able to:

Extend and increase the average customer lifetime value (ALV)
Increase average order value (AOV)
Increase referrals to new customers
Streamline internal and external systems, which may in turn
Decrease costs

Pretty powerful, huh? Let’s dig into how to go about this creative process.

The Customer Lifecycle Diagramming Process

Start by tracing the buyer experience through every interaction, looking for points where the relationship stalls. Generate an action plan with solutions to increase recurring sales, gain new customers and wring every dollar from your current database. Then expand the plan to touch every prospect with a series of 7-13+ actions. According to a Microsoft study, 89% of sales people give up after a fourth contact, while after a 9^th touch, firms had a 90% chance of being ready to receive a proposal. That’s why part two of this project is to develop a series of touch points.

Note how in the customer lifecycle diagram below, the process illustrates:

Activities that happen post-sale to put the consumer into a new sales cycle,
Web visitors who subscribe, then unsubscribe and how they re-enter another cycle until they express their delight publicly as an evangelist of the brand.

Diagram the lead nurturing process of your customer lifecycle to diagnose marketing needs and sales opportunities with a touch point sequence.

List Customer Touch Points

Use a similar structure to map the lifecycle of your customers interactions. Start with your list of customer touches to identify missed customer needs, such as:

Customer acquisition and nurturing activities to gain a registration or purchase
Solicitation of upsells and future purchases
Web visitor searches, ease of navigation, queries and replies
Resolved customer retention, phone messaging and other service issues
Responses to reviews
Requests for testimonials

Evaluate how your customers do their research, then examine the entire purchase and customer service process, the follow-up steps and retention system. Scrutinize cases, surveys and methods from stem to stern: sales, marketing, customer care, IT, fulfillment and administration team activities.

Look at how you initially capture a first connection. It’s important to capture an email address as soon as possible to begin and continue customer interaction. Review and reconsider incentive offers for email opt-ins. Then review how retention problems and lost clients are handled, as well as the renewal cycles to attract the prospect again, regain trust and eventually acquire a new brand champion.

Initially, your customer lifecycle diagram may look like a tree with lots of branches. Your goal is to create and close loops that solve problems, reward the customer, present new delightful experiences and continue a mutually rewarding relationship. Along the way, you’ll identify various additional offers and marketing assets you will need to facilitate operations. You may also revise your FAQs or add a Live Chat feature.

Enhance Your Program Creatively with Touch Point Options

Continually add new content to stimulate customer interest. Here are some examples of customer touch points to generate and plug into the process and department procedures:

How-to videos
Sale sheets
Catalogs to pack with products being shipped
Coupons and discount promo codes
Customer service telemarketing scripts
Checklists
Premiums or dimensional direct mail pieces and oh, so much more.

As you evaluate the customer lifecycle, you may discover opportunities for product development to increase the available upsell options, for instance. You may revise procedures and retrain team members or change the website to increase speed and improve search results and navigation. Marketing, PR and customer service staff may monitor community and social media activities more closely. Marketing may provide accounting, customer service and sales with additional materials (bill stuffers, thank-you cards, email templates and post-call surveys) as well as revise or expand messaging, ads, newsletters, emailings and landing pages.

Example of Customer Touchpoint Sequence

In B2B sales, it easily takes 7-13+ touches to close a deal over $100. Let’s walk through a possible customer scenario that might give you some ideas:

A business starts by using a free white paper to secure an email address.
The Thank You page where the white paper is downloaded offers a 25% discount on a first purchase reminder from the site with a link back to a landing page related to the white paper topic.
The customer makes a purchase and sees other products bought by other customers who bought this same product.
The Thank You confirmation page provides an opportunity to share with friends.
A follow-up email asks about satisfaction and provides a link to provide a review.
If a customer languishes without activity for a given period, customer service may reach out by phone, email or direct mail with another incentive, such as a discount for permission to autoship product.
The freebie, discount or incentive that leads to a renewal triggers follow-up thanks, sharing, reviewing and enticements.
A request for a testimonial or referral may offer a free month of product or service.

With the hard work done, the team can enjoy better results as they modify and maintain the program to make it constantly relevant and engaging. Both the company and the consumer will enjoy the results of improved lead acquisition, nurturing and retention strategies.

If you need guidance to map your customer lifecycle process, we can help. Get started with a free marketing reverse sales lead funnel audit. Contact us for a free consultation!

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Get inspired by our successful strategies, tactics and results of Meeting Making Campaigns in Case Studies. Beasley Direct provides insightful guidance into the lead nurturing process in our free white paper: “Why It Takes 7-13 Touches to Generate a Qualified B2B Sales Lead Today.”

By Laurie Beasley, Co-Founder and President, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

The post Diagramming Your Customer Lifecycle to Turbo-charge Sales appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is Appointed as Demand Generation and Marketing Automation Consulting Agency for Frank, Rimerman Consulting

Andy Hoover — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 15:59:52 +0000

Frank, Rimerman Consulting Appoints Beasley as their Demand Generation and Marketing Automation Consulting Agency.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., a Northern California-based full service direct and online marketing agency, has been appointed as a demand generation and marketing consulting agency for Frank, Rimerman Consulting, a business systems consulting division of Frank, Rimerman + Co. LLP, one of the largest locally owned CPA firms in California. The initial work will focus on the following: analyzing the sales lead funnel and recommending demand generation campaigns, executing email campaigns on the Pardot marketing automation system, and content creation.

About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. Beasley provides services in inbound and outbound marketing including: content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, website design, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., helps clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California.

About Frank, Rimerman Consulting

Frank, Rimerman Consulting (FRC) is the business systems consulting division of Frank, Rimerman + Co. LLP, one of the largest locally owned accounting and business consulting firms in California with offices in Palo Alto, San Francisco, San Jose, and St. Helena. FRC serves a growing list of clients globally, delivering SaaS Corporate Performance Management (CPM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions and value-added consulting services to organizations of all sizes. With deep finance, technology, and industry expertise, FRC helps clients gain operational and cost efficiencies.

Press contacts:

Laurie Beasley
President, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.
lbeasley@beasleydirect.com
408-782-0046 x21

Steve Wolford
Partner, Consulting Group
swolford@frankrimermanconsulting.com
408-535-8071

Learn more about Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., demand generation services here.

The post Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is Appointed as Demand Generation and Marketing Automation Consulting Agency for Frank, Rimerman Consulting appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.