Managing your relationships with customers is easier than ever. The only limit is your imagination. The great challenge for marketing is being able to track and attribute sales deals closed won to marketing activities such as: Trade Shows, Ads, News Letters, websites, web ads etc.

Trade Show leads are universally hated by sales people. Lets face it unless marketers carefully pre-qualify visitors at the show we often end up with a bunch of biz cards that were tossed in a fishbowl looking to win a prize. It should be no surprise that 90% of trade show leads Never get any follow up. (according to the folks at Sandler Sales Irvine) Using E-marketing tools like Pardot we can qualify & disqualify Trade Show leads without wasting our Sale Teams valuable time.

By tracking the behavior of your prospects as they interact with your marketing efforts, one can qualify the prospect before even making the first sales call. This is done by using Pardot to track, score and grade the on line behavior of prospects. We get the prospect to provide us information by asking them questions before they are allowed to take certain  actions for example: Download a white paper, enter a contest, register for a newsletter etc. By only asking a few questions at each stage prospects are willing to give us a bit more info at each step. Don’t be the marketer that makes them crawl over broken glass to get basic information, that is answer 10 to 20 questions before getting anywhere. Most will answer 2 -3 then more you ask at one time the fewer responses you get. Also then expect to be contacted however don’t pummel them with calls, emails etc. Let them opt in rather than dragooned in.

Once we have identified our visitor – prospect we can follow their behavior using tools like Pardot. How you Score and Grade their online behavior is industry dependent. This is as much art as science in the beginning. To start ask your better customers how they found you. As new customers are acquired ask them how they went about their search of what folks to help them do what you do or sell.  I have had many ah ha’s over the years. By tracking and scoring behavior one can determine who is likely to make a purchase. This can be done by back tracking the path taken by customers who bought. It also pays to look at those that did not buy for down scoring them as well. I did a whole presentation on Lead Scoring & Grading see below.

For more information about Salesforce & Pardot go to: http://www.pardot.com or ww.Salesforce.com

Not sure if any of this applies in your world on the off chance it does we may want to talk. phil@salesforcemaven.com