Daily Marketing Tips

Do You Know Where Your Sales Leads Are?

Business-to-business sales over the Internet will exceed $2 trillion by 2010, according to International Data Corp., Framingham, MA. Forrester Research, Cambridge, MA, projects even an even higher number. What’s more, the Direct Marketing Association estimates interactive marketing expenditures reached $8.9 billion by 2008. Under the circumstances, calling the Internet a significant new touchpoint between marketers and their prospects, partners and customers seems like an understatement.

The real problem with stating the obvious is that it can obscure what is less apparent and more interesting. I think that may be the case with the Internet as a marketing medium. Dot.com has become integral to branding. E-mail is emerging as the most direct form of direct mail. And, “Visit our Web site” has taken its place alongside “Call 1-800″ as a standard call-to-action. The Internet is useful for far more than initiating contact and capturing leads - the functions of traditional touchpoints such as print direct mail, telemarketing, trade shows and advertising.

All cats are gray in the dark. Pretty much the same can be said for leads acquired - and distributed - by conventional means. They carry little or no information about how or where they were acquired, what offers were responded to or how likely the prospect is to buy what or when. As a result, leads can’t very well be profiled, segmented or qualified. Distributing them to the channel is a choice or a shot in the dark or both. So leads often languish, filed and forgotten; hard-earned potential sales gone stale…a very real problem for companies whose lifeblood is their distribution networks.

The Internet is a unique interaction engine. Via e-mail and Web site visits, it enables marketers not only to establish contact with prospects, but also to carry on a progressive dialogue with them over time. The process has come to be known by various names: interactive marketing, one-to-one marketing, personalized marketing and permission marketing. It’s all of these things. It’s also an enormously rich source of information that marketers can use to turn prospects into customers and customers into repeat buyers.

But hold on. This brave new world is rife with signs reading, “Caveat vendor.” Probably because it makes it so easy to talk to customers, Internet-based interactive marketing can easily lead marketers into temptation. Before you give in, remember that the wisdom of the permission-marketing movement is not just etiquette. Easy as it feels, your electronic link with prospects and customers is a slender thread, and they can cut it at the slightest provocation. Here are four tips for keeping the lines of communication open and productive:

1. Don’t overreach.

E-commerce etiquette is like everyday manners, except that the financial stakes are higher. So don’t pry, and don’t put the burden on the customer. Asking someone to fill out a 20-question form any time they visit your Web site is probably arrogant and almost certainly a barrier to response. At each interaction, all you need to gather is enough information to make the next interaction possible. With the right tools, you can capture everything you need to learn about each lead at each stage. You can feed that information back into your system, then draw on it to develop the leads you have and capture new ones.

2. Give customers the power of choice.

It has become standard practice to include an opt-out mechanism in marketing e-mail. That’s exactly as it should be. The logic of interactive marketing is to encourage people to subscribe to your product and service information - willingly. To make that happen, you have to give them control of the relationship. Today the technology exists to conditionally opt-in or opt-out - your customers can selectively sign up for all your campaigns or only periodic, specific information. Now that is real power.

3. Don’t worry.

You’ll reap the rewards because while they’re subscribing to your information, you’re subscribing to theirs. Tools exist to aggregate, analyze and understand everything you glean through every interaction with every lead. The more you learn, the more effectively you can personalize your next interaction with each one - and the more precisely you can qualify each lead.

4. Turn your distribution network into subscribers, too.

Just as you can acquire and qualify leads through a series of Internet-based interactions, the tools exist for automating the process of distributing qualified leads to your distribution network - then monitoring their conversion into sales via the Internet. Your distribution partners can use any standard browser to accept, track and provide disposition data about the leads they receive.

By using the Internet to interact with your distribution network, you’ll save enormous amounts of time and effort over the traditional processes of qualifying and distributing leads manually. You’ll be able to see which channel partners are closing sales most quickly and effectively. You’ll be able to analyze their performance and you can use what you learn to design more effective lead acquisition and distribution efforts.

Most importantly, you’ll personalize communications with your network distributors while delivering the best-qualified, most actionable leads to each one. While you’re helping distributors close the most sales, you’ll close the loop between leads and sales.

Treating every sales lead and network distributor as an individual isn’t just a matter of respect. It’s also the most effective way to turn leads into sales. In marketing, the objective isn’t to tell people what they want, it’s to learn what they want and then make it available to them.

That’s the momentous, revolutionary excitement of the Internet as a marketing medium and the marketing automation tools that have emerged along with it. They have so much to tell us about who we’re doing business with - from prospects and customers to our distribution network - and that knowledge is golden.

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