Phil Lauterjung

Posts Tagged ‘lead nurturing’

We are now in the dreaded fourth quarter, and some are saying that the recession is over.  Maybe, maybe not.  That doesn’t change the fact that sales teams everywhere are scrambling to put up bonus-earning numbers for 2009.  That, of course, assumes that you were dealt reasonable quotas to begin with.  Okay, okay I hear the grumbling already about that topic.  You’ll need to take that up with your boss – I can’t help with that one.  Read more... (481 words, 2 images, estimated 1:55 mins reading time)

This is one of those topics that could easily have twice as many posts, but I think that eight is enough.  Hey, that might make a good name for a TV show – oooohhh now I’m dating myself.

One topic in this series that has only received passing mention is email marketing.  That should clearly be a component of any good lead generation program and I have written about in the past – Tips for Effective Email Marketing Campaigns, Email Marketing: Getting & Keeping Subscribers, and Increase Sales with Marketing in Transactional Emails.  Feel free to take a look at those articles.  Read more... (430 words, 4 images, estimated 1:43 mins reading time)

Before we dive into Marketing Automation I think it would be good to clarify a very important point.  Leads are people.  I know that might be stating the obvious, but it is critical that we keep that in mind.

The person at the other end of your electronic piece of information has hopes and dreams, fears and frustrations, goals, maybe a family, friends who like them, etc. – just like you and I do.  Never, ever lose sight of that while you are trying to sell to them.  Marketing Automation is all about developing relationships that will lead to long-term customer relationships.  Read more... (729 words, 2 images, estimated 2:55 mins reading time)

If you’ve been following along in this series (if not, why not?), you have hopefully started what you need to in order to get more leads.

Now you’ve got to decide which are the HOT leads?  Remember, we mentioned before that only 20-25% of your leads will be “sales-ready”.  How do you figure that out?

Start with lead scoring.  A process that should be done before you start getting leads, but if you haven’t yet done that don’t worry.  No time like right now to get it done.  You’ll want to take that exercise you went through earlier in developing a typical buyer profile and use that to develop a lead scoring process.  Read more... (608 words, 2 images, estimated 2:26 mins reading time)

A number of years ago there was a very funny movie called City Slickers, and if you haven’t seen it go rent it.  You’ll be glad you did.  Briefly it’s about some New York ‘city slickers’ who get the bright idea to spend a couple of weeks at a working dude ranch out west.  Jack Palance plays Curly, a grizzled old cowboy who epitomizes what it means to be a cowboy.  In one scene he explains Curly’s Law:  Read more... (620 words, 2 images, estimated 2:29 mins reading time)

There are plenty of theories about this topic and much of it is wrong.  That is if you accept the findings of a study done by MIT (the brainiac university) and InsideSales.com.  They actually had a professor (Dr. James Oldroyd) with a PhD head the study, so I’m guessing that might have a little credibility with you.

They examined 3 years of data across six companies that generate and respond to web leads, from over fifteen thousand leads and over one hundred thousand phone call attempts.

They focused on one question for this study:  Read more... (562 words, 5 images, estimated 2:15 mins reading time)