You can’t think of your marketing database as just a list of names and contact information. It’s so much more than that. This data represents what’s possible for your business. It’s your future customers and referral sources. It’s next month’s closed deals and next year’s revenue. A company’s marketing database can be the lifeblood of its revenue growth strategy. Consequently, it should be regarded as a key intellectual asset of the business. As with any corporate asset, there should be a plan to protect it, enhance, grow it and leverage it.

Marketing is notorious for its jargon. And while the terminology itself isn’t necessarily what's important, what you do need to know is how these strategies and tactics can help you. In this post, we’ll explore inbound marketing and lead generation, and what each can do for you.

The objective of every inbound marketing program is to generate leads and build a consistent sales pipeline. It would be ideal if every lead that was generated was highly qualified and highly motivated. That’s what the sales team is craving, right? If that was the case, then it would make sense that every lead should be handed off to the sales team right away. Unfortunately, the real world is not that straightforward.

While inbound marketing will generate qualified/motivated leads, it will also produce “not-ready-to-buy-yet” leads (Not Ready) and “not-sure-if-this-is-an-opportunity-or-not” leads (Not Sure).  So how should these leads be handled?  Should they be passed to sales too?

When it comes to email marketing, it’s a tough battlefield. There are many things that make the difference between an email that gets read versus an email that gets deleted. When you consider that the average individual’s email inbox is bombarded by marketing emails every single day, it’s easy to get discouraged.

After all, how are you going to get your emails in front of your readers? You've heard it before: customization and personalization make email relevant to readers. One of the best way to offer relevant emails is through email workflows that are designed to accomplish specific goals. This post shares 11 to get you started!

Investing in Generating Leads and Closing Sales

In Part 1 of this series on budgeting for marketing and sales, I discussed 7 different building blocks – pieces of infrastructure if you will – that are fundamental for a growth strategy. In this post, I’ll be discussing where and how to use those expenditures to achieve your growth goals.

Most marketing organizations have put their marketing plan in place for the year. It has received a blessing from the executive team, and has been funded by the CFO. Plans are now being executed, and soon they’ll be a flurry of activity—tradeshows, webinars, direct mail, telemarketing, email blasts, print ads, banner ads, etc. And if all goes well, that flurry of activity will lead to an avalanche of leads. But what happened to last year’s avalanche of leads? Maybe the flurry of leads never came last year. Or maybe your sales team closed them all. More likely though, is that the avalanche did come, and those leads are still sitting in your CRM. Your sales team probably called them once or twice. Maybe they even had an appointment with a few of them. But now they are stalled. Or dead. And just sitting in your CRM. 

First, what’s a “workflow”? It’s used by HubSpot and others to describe a series of automated emails that are sent to contacts for lead nurturing. 

You probably already have workflows set up around your premium content campaigns, sending follow-up emails with content related to what a prospect downloaded or signed up to receive. (If not, get on that! It’s a great place to start with lead nurturing.)

But workflows can be especially effective when they’re tied to a prospect’s stage in the buyer’s journey. Prospects who’ve done considerable research and are already familiar with what you offer need something different than those who have just started looking at different options to solve their issue. Here are four workflows you can use at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

As with most marketing and sales questions, there is a short and long answer to this question. The short answer is: as many times as it takes. The longer answer isn’t quite so black and white.

Let’s start with exploring why someone would ask this question in the first place. What I’ve found in my many years, working with companies of all shapes and sizes, is that there is a natural inclination to treat inbound (or website or marketing) leads very differently than prospects identified and cultivated by individual salespeople. This is especially true for those industries that still rely heavily on cold calling.

When LeadG2 first started marketing to prospects, one of the things that immediately resonated with companies was the fact that we had a detailed process that outlined specifically how we achieve success for our clients.

As lead generation experts, we firmly believe that developing and implementing a lead generation strategy is not just something that happens magically—it relies on having a consistent process that can be repeated time and time again. Don't get me wrong, this is not a cookie cutter approach to lead generation. The 7 Step Lead Generation Process is a starting point for all of our conversations while we are planning each client’s strategy. 

Several of our clients have mentioned to us that they felt more at ease knowing a sound strategy was in place rather than us just winging it. It’s best for everyone when there is a documented process that can be referred to. This is also a large part of our educational efforts with our clients as we guide them through how to conduct their first lead generation campaigns.

I spend a lot of time talking to people about their business needs, and if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that nobody needs inbound marketing. Just like nobody needs TV advertising, or retargeting ads, or email marketing, or sponsored LinkedIn posts. What we need are more customers, new revenue streams, more leads, better leads, more renewals, more referrals, and so on and so on.

The point here is that we don’t need marketing; marketing is the solution to the problems we have… our real needs.