Salesforce and Pardot ( or Marketing Cloud emarketing tools) the dynamic duo…!

There is no doubt in my mind that Sales is the hardest job in any company. Unless you have been in sales you simply can not appreciate just how hard it is to sell. Every day you know your going to hear no more often than yes.  Selling is a Team Sport, it takes folks in Marketing on the front end to generate products and customer interest as well as folks on the back end to provide products and services to be sold.

There is a great scene in the Movie Glen Gary – Glen Ross where Kevin Spacy holds up the “Packet of Good Leads” that Mr. Glen Gary – Glen Ross have obtained. When sales are down Marketing is told or more likely blamed because the leads are bad. Well in the old days like in the early 2000s the Sales Folks may have been right (Maybe not) in the past 10 years we can now track and score buying behavior to the point where nearly all the junk leads are gone, and the remaining leads have good prospects. That is the power of combining your CRM with and emarkeing tool like: Pardot, Marketo, Hubspot etc.  Of course this does not happen due to fairy magic. There needs to be feed back from the sales team on what’s working and what’s not working.

You need to have a good model for distributing leads to be worked by inside vs out side sales. Identify and model your leads path through the sales process. Which leads are successfully sold via inside sales, your website or by outside sales the answer may surprise you. Managing that model is best done in your CRM. As I hear someone once note: Ideas are great, but bring data to back it up…! Don’t get caught up in Sales Fantasy versus Sales Reality it’s in the numbers. 

Ties sales and marketing working together as a team, score and grade leads by Sales Closed Won, ROI Sale By Sale, and Cost of Lead Acquisition are some key numbers to consider.  Next  tie your CRM back to your Accounting Software you can close the loop on what sales are closing profitably and those that are weak. Not all business is good business.

What is Lead Scoring and Grading ?

Scoring is based on the Leads online activities, such as attending webinars, downloading white papers & case study’s, watching your videos etc. Some activities are scored higher than others, for example watching a 45 min webinar probably has higher value than simply visiting your website.  

Grading is explicit information provided by the prospect such at Job Title, Department,  Location, Company Size, answers to qualification questions, Lead Source, Demographics  etc.

For us to even create a lead it must be a Marketing Qualified Lead MQL. We compare the New Leads against our model keep the wheat and archive the chaff. Then we nurture the lead until it reaches a Score and Grade that make it a Sales Qualified Lead SQL then it is sent to Sales for immediate contact. Sales is revealed of the task of cold calling freezing cold leads, a SQL is most typically a warm lead. When the lead is either sold or discarded we can evaluate it’s value, cost of acquisition and success rate. Those numbers are critical to adapting the MQL and SQL evaluation process, it only gets better with time.

I can’t imagine any of this is relevant in your situation, on the off chance you are frustrated with emarketing, CRM we may want to talk.