COMMENTS
Hi Mike -
Thanks for the great webinar. I got more out of listening to you today than I did from using an SEO guy for several months, who we spent mega bucks on and we never got anything. What a scam.
So, thanks for bringing SEO back into my 'white hat' thinking! Really appreciate the info. and I will run the website grader and see where we are.
Thanks again,
Robin Ogden
http://www.firedupcareers.com
I was really sorry because I coldn´t attend to this webinar, even if I have the basic knowledge about SEO its always good to remind the reason why we are doing it.
Till next time Mike
Carlos F Muñoa
@Robin - Thanks! Glad you liked it. Tell all your friends! If you have hired and been burned by an SEO consultant before I would really encourage you to take a look at HubSpot. Its only $250/month and you get all the knowledge we have in our heads plus great tools to do SEO yourself. HubSpot is probably cheaper and better than the consultant you had before.
@Carlos - Thanks! If you registered you will get a link to the video recording.
I use the business card with my phone number, and if they're long distance they can contact me via Skype. I"m someone they can call when they need Internet Solutions.
What I love is that this is how business used to operate many years ago before technology got in the way and severed personal connections. Now we are seeing Technology used, as it should be, to assist in building personal relationships.
Mike Ashworth
Business Coaching and Consultancy
Brighton and Hove, Sussex, UK
After the football post, I was really hoping for something with more substance this this post. This seems like common sense. I hope the future posts improve.
@Dan Elliott - After the horrible Patriots loss, I would think you would expect me to stick to Internet marketing :)
Hah! That was a great loss Mike. Get you head screwed back on! ;)Seriously, I have really enjoyed some of your blogs, and I am looking forward to something a little meatier in the future.
Wonderful article. I always said that that technology should be used to enhance the process of
building leads. You can't expect to just blast your prospects with a monthly email and expect some magical connection to "just happen"
I've seen a lot of frustration and money lost when people bank on these magical conversion rates from hard selling a bunch of people that have know idea who your are and believe me, don't care.
Bravo!
Nice post... it accurately reflects my own experience. But I have a challenging question for you.
How do you provide this level of detail if you're a larger company with tons of leads? For example, you're the CMO, so your relationship with prospects is a bit more respectful. Say you're a sales rep at CDW responsible for finding your own leads. Say you get 10 decent leads a day that say "not interested, but keep me posted" How do you keep in touch with them... afterall, you're just a lowly sales rep in their eyes. Now how can all 1000 CDW sales reps nurture relationships without sending out "drip" emails?
Or lets say you're a small firm (like Hubspot) that got an influx of leads (as a result of your TechCrunch review) How can your salespeople nurture relationships with everyone, keeping in mind that it needs to have a personal touch, like the story you described above.
I really liked your post and thought about it last night a lot but couldn't come up with a good answer. It's a paradox brought about by the open source, wiki, peer2peer, Long Tail, world. How do big companies nurture relationships? Seems like a losing battle, doesn't it? I think that's what Seth Godin's "Meatball Sundae" is about.
As we move away from the mass marketing/broadcasting paradigm, how to companies connect with their customers in a meaningful way, given they have literally thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of prospects.
I'm the CEO of my own company, so I can nurture leads because I do all of my own sales. But as I grow and hire more salespeople, I don't know if they'll be able to nurture a lead the same way I can.
Raza Imam
http://BoycottSoftwareSweatshops.com
I found your blog by reading another blogger (because I recently launched my own blog). I spent my entire Valentine's morning reading every post ... you guys are that good! Keep up the great work. And thank you for your wonderful - and free - site analysis tool. Be sure to look me up if I can ever return the favor.
In respose to Raza (I liked Boycottsweatshops.com, btw) one way to get your multitude of salesperson to effectively interact with a lead/client is through the disciplined use of a CRM or SFA system. If they note the gist of all conversations, are asking the right questions then they should be able to set a follow up with the full knowledge of what was discussed/of interest and maybe even prepare appropriate materials and responses before calling/emailing. As a CEO I'm sure your clever enough to keep all that info in your head, ;) but a mere salesperson needs to be religious in logging and noting all communications. SEO gets em to raise their hand, your saleteam (like Heidi who does a great job, BTW) are the ones ultimately responsible for establishing and nurturing that client. BTW I am not a CRM/SFA sales guy, just a mere Bus Dev Mgr. You guys at Hub-Spot do a brilliant job! Keep it up!
@Raza - You ask in more detail the natural questions that evolve from this article. I am not sure a good answer exists yet. If I were a salesrep at CDW as you mention, I would manage my pipeline in SalesForce.com. I would want to keep in touch with people that were enegaged in buying or evaluating something. I think marketing should be responsible for lead nurturing. So, if I were that sales rep I would want a way to move leads back to marketing, and marketing should be smart about offering them webinars, making friends with them on Facebook, letting them read your blog, etc. And then when they indicated a higher level of interests, promote them to a lead again. I don't know if it is possible to really do this in the way that we would want. The platforms/communities you should use are nto easy to connect.
Mike and Bryan,
Thanks for your insight. I don't use a CRM so that's why I didn't think of it... your comments really make sense. I also like the idea of marketing nurturing leads.
Mike's story is the picture perfect scenario and mimics my own interactions with clients. I just couldn't figure out how to scale it up. Everyone's talking about web 2.0 and participation in social media, and interaction on blogs, but I couldn't figure out you could do this on a grander scale.
Mike, I also appreciate the maturity and sophistication of thought when you said it may not be possible to solve this problem exactly how we want. There's not always a perfect solution to everything and it takes a lot of maturity to admit it.
And for the record, I may be the CEO, but I'm definitely not the sharpest pencil in the box ;-)
This conversation has inspired me to post a blog, my first (I'm blushing) discussing Bus Dev and SFA and CRM's. I agree with Mike, the SalesForce solution is one of the best.. and it does take some time to get familiarized, but the effort is far far outweighed by the benefits. If interested my blog is at http://busdevil.blogspot.com/
Best of luck!
We are implementing a nuturing program at our company and I am struggling with what Raza had posted as well. What is the balance between automation and personal touch? Marketing is going to do the nurturing but for the personal touch we need to rely on sales for that. Is it as easy as making your saleforce be a slave to their CRM?
Hi Mike,
Thanks for following me over to my blog. One of the things that caught my attention was your webinar. (Disclaimer: I work for a web conferencing company). Something that occured to me would be if you could somehow integrate your webinar service into your CRM and MA software. Do you have a partner for such things? I would be interested in talking with you about some of the things that would make a partnership like that successful.
Drop me a line if you are interested.
Thanks
Mike
Nurturing leads? Then you need to know a lot about your leads. Some of this information can be 'read' from your website: the number of visits, the pages, the time spent, the click path. Even better: by monitoring the reactions upon your communication or conversation, represented by the following visit(s), you can fine tune your message content. A service like LEADSExplorer could be usefull.
@John Parker - that type of lead intelligence is cool and useful... I hear there is a cool product called "HubSpot" that does some cool stuff just like that :)
@Mike Volpe - I might be wrong, but I don't think Hubspot reveals company names. They are aimed at a different market segment.
@John - HubSpot does reveal company names in aggregate based on website visitors, it also tells you the company name for an individual even if someone fills out a form using a yahoo or gmail address (all of this technology is limited by the limitations of IP address lookups, like most similar solutions)
i find your site to be very helpful