Software publishers and their partner communities have made (and will continue to make) significant capital investments in robust trial engines with an expectation that the trial experience will provide sufficient “proof” and “comfort” to intelligently inform and drive an accelerated decision making process. If only it were that easy.

Historically, “proof” and “comfort” were established via product demonstrations delivered throughout the sales/buying cycle. Prior to product demonstrations sales professionals typically facilitated structured discovery sessions to determine prospect business pains and business process challenges, then converted them into recommended functionality. This functionality would then be demonstrated by a seasoned pre-sales/delivery consultant, who inevitably framed and positioned their solution recommendation as well as handled objections and/or corrected misconceptions. With these comprehensive and influential “proof” activities in place, most Partners drove a 20% – 25% close ratio; and buyers experienced a 50% – 65% project failure rate.

Replacing this structured approach with an unmanaged trial experience will inevitably lower both conversion and close ratios. Business applications are complex beasts, so unless prospects are looking for simple contact management (CRM) or a basic set of core financials (ERP), there is a high probability their trial experience will be a frustrating one as they root through complex modules and wrestle with unfamiliar UIs in search of their ERP/CRM panacea.

Yet…..with average selling prices dropping, cost of sale increasing and a demand-side transition towards subscription licensing on the rise, trial experiences are here to stay. The question becomes…..how do we mitigate or reduce prospect frustration and confusion as they blindly attempt to unearth their utopian future state amongst the hundreds, (or thousands) of available menu and screen options?

The answer lies in developing a trial management strategy that includes some or all of the following options:

• Limit the trial experience to 1-2 contacts
• Create a template for prospects that helps them define the specific functionality they need to explore during the trial to meet their critical business requirements
• Document and provide prospects with a “trial guide” that walks them step-by-step through the most critical (and differentiating) business processes
• Deliver regularly scheduled mandatory one-to-many trial preparation webcasts that prospects must attend prior to securing access to their software trial
• Deliver one-to-one trial engine ‘tours” for larger opportunities
• Configure trial engines for specific vertical industries
• Implement a “chat now” capability throughout the trial application that routes requests to a defined customer friendly support resource in real-time
• Schedule and facilitate post-trial reviews to address outstanding questions as well as misconceptions, unspoken objections and confusion.

Given the breadth, depth and maturity of business applications, prospect confusion and frustration is an unavoidable by-product of the trial experience. CRM and ERP providers do not allow their own pre-sales engineers to deliver prospect/customer demonstrations until they have completed a rigorous and exhaustive training and testing program that often lasts months. Expecting unsophisticated prospects (by comparison) to intuitively replicate this experience on their own is unrealistic. Software publishers and partners will need to support their trial experience with structure and prescriptive guidance, or risk the anticipated returns from these significant and strategic capital investments.

Many companies are preparing to bring great new solutions to the market, often leveraging the technology advantages that Cloud based development and deployment platforms offer.  However, as business owners and product managers prepare for the launch of their new solutions, inevitably the question of how much can or should we charge comes up.

No business wants lose money, just as no business want to leave money on the table, so understanding the ramifications of how you choose to price your solution is critical. A lower price may mean more rapid adoption and increased demand.  A higher price may allow you to focus on delivering a premium user experience while making a handsome profit.  But lets take a step back and release some of the old preconceptions many of us have about how to monetize an IT solution.

The new Cloud paradigm allows solution providers to become very creative about how they make money with their solution offerings.  It’s no longer just about licensing your solution and charging for maintenance, implementation and integration services.  There are a lot of different ways to earn revenue on-line and in the Cloud, and many have the added advantage of making the cost of your solution look very attractive to your future customers.

So before you package up and price your new Cloud solution the way you traditionally have, think about some of these alternative methods of charging for your solution and remember they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Many cloud providers successfully combine several methods to arrive at a successful hybrid pricing models.

Freemium

Providing a basic level of service for free and then offering premium upgrades. This encourages customers to try out your solution and once they have started to derive business value from it, they will quickly outgrow the limited number of free features and want to upgrade.

Ad Based Revenue

Is a valid pricing method, though a tough one to successfully implement. Having said this, Google and Facebook have both generated significant revenues from advertising while providing their services free of charge for users.

Per Meter Pricing

This has applicability only in certain situations. It is good, for example for file sharing or backup applications and is often used in combination with other methods such as per user pricing.

Per Transaction Pricing

Is now a common pricing method, but only applicable where it easy to carve out discrete transaction units. The growth goal here, of course, is to increase the number of transactions per customer.

Monthly Subscription

Now one of the most common payment mechanisms, though be careful not to limit the commitment period just because the payment frequency is monthly. A good service level agreement allows customer to make 2 to 3 year commitments when subscribing.

Revenue Share

This method provides you with greater market coverage but requires the ISV to take only a cut of the total revenues and share the rest with it selling partners. The share is most often higher for whoever owns the brand and customer relationship.

Per User

One of the most common pricing mechanisms, this may include number of seats or named users. Once again packaging your offering in such a way as to make premium upgrades available will help to ensure that you are providing a low end, easy point of entry for your customers and then quickly encouraging them to upgrade in order to have access to an expanded set of functions and features or to add more users.

Leveraging one or more of these monetization methodologies or creating a new one of your own just may be the key to explosive, profitable growth for your new Cloud solution.  So remember to think outside the box when you are envisioning how you will bring your next solution to market.

Good luck, and good selling.

But really…..asking open ended questions is like table stakes in a poker game; it’s the price of admission and everybody does it.

Using questions effectively is one of the most important skills a sales professional, or a sales leader, can have. It’s also one of the most poorly executed.

Most Sales pros know about:

• Open Ended questions
• Leading Questions
• Probing Questions
• Making a Statement, but disguising it as a question

But one of the most effective, and least well-leveraged is the skill of asking 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th… level questions.

What exactly is a 2^nd or 3^rd level question? It’s actually very simple; I ask you a question (that’s a first level question), you give me an answer, then I ask you a question building off of the answer you just gave me (2^nd level question), you give me another answer, I ask another question building off of that answer (3^rd level)….

This is the natural way that comfortable and meaningful conversation goes in ‘real life. So why not do it in our business life? There are a bunch reasons why this happens, or doesn’t happen – the sales person or leader isn’t curious enough…or doesn’t know how to process the impact of the answer they just received and doesn’t really know what question to ask next…or has fear of feeling like they are interrogating the prospect… There are a myriad of reasons, but frankly, none of them are good enough.

By NOT asking multi-level questions, we are having superficial discussions and we are not engaging the prospect in a meaningful way; we’re just like everybody else.

Most sales reps ask 5 questions when they speak to a suspect or prospect:

B – Do you have budget?

A – Do you have the authority to make a decision?

N – What do you need?

T – When do you need it?

The BONUS QUESTION – Can I have an appointment?

Waaaaaay too often we leave a TON of valuable information on the table because we don’t drill down in levels. Most often, a sales person or leader asks a question; example – “What problem are you trying to solve with this project”? The Prospect answers with something that usually sounds like “My current system no longer gives us what we need”. The most common thing that happens next is that the questions become about ‘What do you need in a new system”?

(Interestingly, most technology sales people and sales leaders ARE comfortable asking multi-level questions when asking about features and capability needs.)

But the real value would come from asking questions like “What, exactly, is it about your current system that is causing you problems”? (2^nd level question) “Why is that happening”? (3^rd level question) “What kinds of business problems is that causing you”? (4^th level question) “How is that affecting you and your company”? (5^th level question).

This doesn’t apply only to sales reps, this applies to sales leaders as well. When we are doing pipeline and forecast and deal reviews with our team members, we should dive in and ask more meaningful questions.

This helps our sales team mates to learn and to ‘see’ things in their sales cycles that they may not have seen before. Also (and if you’re a sales leader and you remember nothing else from this blog, hang on to this piece), every sales rep does some amount of prep work prior to coming into a pipeline / forecast / deal review meeting with you. Most will anticipate 1 or maybe 2 levels of questions you might ask them. If you simply ask a 3^rd level question, you and the sales rep will get much closer to the facts in a deal.

Asking multi-level questions when speaking with prospects, and with each other, helps us to see the situation from different angles and depths. It helps us all to learn and find new issues, new answers. It also helps separate us as sales professionals from the rest of the herd.

Be different. Be curious. Ask ; you’ll be very happy that you did.

This objective is daunting because the standard “discovery/demo” strategy hasn’t changed significantly in the past 20 years whereas prospect  buying strategy most certainly has. Historically, sales professionals and demonstration consultants were inclined to show the majority of a solution’s capabilities as well as all of its differentiating features when attempting to impress prospect stakeholders. This process often resulted in extensive discovery, exhaustive demonstrations, the setting of unreal expectations and a high cost of sale.

This sales strategy was born during a time of legitimate product differentiation, a time, unfortunately, that has largely passed us by. Whether we like it, or agree with it, or not, product parity is a reality in the eyes of the buying community (mystery shop a competitor if you disagree).  Which leads us to one of the primary changes in buying behavior drivers: “Good Enough” has replaced “Best of Breed”.

Failed projects and missed expectations, compounded by a risk-averse buying psychology brought about by a depressed economy, have resulted in a lowering of expectations. Prospects continue to confirm (by voting with their wallet) that projects/solutions that deliver acceptable results with a minimal of risk are preferable to those that promise greater benefits, with elevated risk.

If the task at hand is to increase deal velocity then we must find a way to remove the barriers that prevent prospects from making decisions, and to accomplish that feat we must remove the perception of project risk. Prospect uncertainty always results in increased due diligence and requests for exhaustive and expensive proof activities: 2^nd and 3^rd solution demonstrations, client reference calls or visits and fixed-fee requests; all buy-side strategies for increasing comfort and decreasing the perception of risk.

If prospects are comfortable with “Good Enough” then Partners should be as well. Configuring solutions sets that appeal to this growing buying group and aligning sales process objectives with prospect buying process objectives will bear fruit. Understandingly, not all opportunities are going to fit the “Good Enough” profile, but Partners that define their own unique “Good Enough” solution, based on the industries they serve and the IP they have developed, will be able to quickly qualify/categorize new opportunities into accelerated vs. traditional profiles, and then apply the appropriate sales strategy.

Identifying “Good Enough” opportunity profiles, then executing an accelerated sales process focused on risk reduction, will align Partner sales organizations with the prospect’s buying psychology, and unconsciously predispose them to want to select you as the vendor of choice. And if that strategy fails…..well, I guess you can always do another demo.

For our purposes, ‘strategy’ means that there’s a plan. ‘Tactics’ means that you’re thinking on your feet.

A sales cycle that includes both is much more likely to succeed than a cycle that relies on only one of them.

Tactics make sales fun. Strategy makes sales more predictable.

Here’s the executive summary – do both; and do them both in every sales cycle. Trust me on this; the sales cycle where you (or your rep) believe that the deal is a ‘slam dunk’ and you don’t need to plan it out…you know the one….at some point you’ll all be “standing around the fax” (or the phone, or your computer….or the mail box) waiting to get the good word, but it doesn’t come and you’ll be wondering, ‘what the heck went wrong?’ If you have a plan / strategy, chances are better that you won’t have to answer that question.

Tactics (especially when not accompanied by sound strategy) can get risky.

So the rest of this blog is dedicated to a true and pretty funny story involving sales tactics.

A few years ago I had the pleasure of working at a software company that had the best sales force I’ve ever seen. One of the very best in that group was a guy named Clark. For years a major Eastern-based utility company refused to do business with our company.  The VP of IT hated our company. No matter what anybody tried, nobody could get a meeting with that VP.

That is, until Clark got involved.

Thinking about this still makes me laugh.

Clark took an ace of hearts – from a regular deck of playing cards – and mailed it to the guy in a plain white envelope; no letter, no nothing. A week later he sent the ace of diamonds.  A week after that the ace of clubs. On the 4^th week he showed up at the guy’s door step and asked to see him. The gate keeper asked if he had an appointment. Clark said “No ma’am,” So she asked, “Whom may I say is calling”. Clark said “Tell him it’s the Ace of Spades”.

The guy came out just because he HAD TO see who this guy was. Within a quarter, Clark closed a significant deal with that company.

This is true.

There is a pretty funny epilogue to this story.

A few years later we had hired a new, young sales rep. I can’t remember her name. She was nice and she tried hard. She had heard of Clark’s story so she decided to try it herself on a particularly tough account. She did the exact same things Clark did. But, when she showed up at the Prospect’s office the guy panicked and called security! They escorted her out of the building. The Prospect had become so freaked out about the mysterious cards, he thought that somebody was out to get him!

This really is a true story.

So, tactics can be fun, but don’t rely entirely on them. Happy selling!

But fear not, there are sunny rays of hope already filtering through the dark storm clouds. Let’s take a look at what this means for Microsoft Dynamics partners.

Fear

For many partners the shock of change and the lack of perspective has produced a fear-base reaction of denial. “Nothing is really going to change for my business because we are good service providers and our customers love us”’ say some. Others reply, “It doesn’t matter where the application is installed, the customer is still going to need implementation help.” The downside of denial is we stand still while the winds of change sweep over us. In this particular scenario, this is not a recommended strategy.

Challenges

All indications are that your CRM and/or ERP business will change dramatically over the next 2-4 years (sooner if just CRM) in the following areas:

• Customer attitudes – Our customers are tired of costly, badly run software projects. They demand and will receive high quality business software that they can rent by the user. If they don’t like their partner or solution, they can and will switch.
• Cash flow: A percentage of your license and services revenues will be paid on a subscription basis while your expenses will remain on their current payment schedule. This will have a significant negative impact on your cash flow for about 2-3 years.
• Marketing: New customers will find you most likely via the web. This will require your company to:
  • Reduce the cost of prospect acquisition significantly from current averages.
  • Focus on specialized vertical markets or industries (1-4 max)
  • Fine tune your website and related demand generation engine
  • Develop more structured prospect nurturing processes
  • Understand that your market will be North America or the English speaking world
• Sales: Your customer add volume will most likely increase dramatically with a corresponding need to reduce cost of sales from current averages. This will require your company to:
  • Tightly integrate you marketing and sales processes
  • Sell remotely
  • Sell in waves with each customer, adding new licenses and services over time
  • Adjust your sales team skill sets
  • Adjust your sales compensation model
• Create IP: The most successful cloud-based Dynamics partner will have significant revenues generated from reselling or having others resell their own intellectual property. The greatest rewards will go to the business that creates the best solutions first that can be resold by others. This IP will be software, templates, tools or services based. In essence, your company will become an ISV.
• Delivery services: Many of the traditional implementation services will no longer be needed. Some of the remaining services will need to be highly standardized to reduce costs. Many if not all cloud based services will be performed remotely. Process improvement services will become much more in demand. This will change your delivery team member skillsets.

Remedies

It is important to remember that this is a process of transitioning your business over time. Albeit, the time to start the transition is now, since we are no longer in denial! Here are some key elements to your transition roadmap.

• Forecast your cash flow requirements: Model your mix of revenues and expenses over the next 3-4 years based on a range of predicted sales of cloud-based software and services. Organize the necessary capital sources to cover your shortfall. If you don’t have a good modelling tool, contact us at Salesworks for help.
• Develop and package your IP: Start the process of identifying your domain expertise, library of software assets and reference sites. Work through the process and investment of standardizing and pricing your product for cloud distribution.
• Branding: With more of a product focus, you will need to secure product brand names, URL(s), keywords and tag lines to be used in your marketing efforts.
• Demand generation engine: Revamp your website to do at least the following:
  • Focus on one or more vertical market(s)
  • Generate demand using sound SEO and PPC methods
  • Develop repeatable and cost effective prospect nurturing processes to take advantage of the volume of inquiries generated from your revamped website.
• Sales function: Work on reducing your sales cycle by half. This will most likely require providing prospects with self-help resources and selling customers on smaller initial projects to get started. Since you will be highly vertical market focused, you’ll be able to repeat and refine much of our selling processes.
• Sales compensation: Subscription based selling requires a different compensation model. Work through the creation of a good sales compensation plan based on subscription sales that is both motivating and cost effective. If you need help figuring out the optimal configurations, contact use at Salesworks.
• Create a transition roadmap: This in essence is your long term project plan broken down by task, responsibilities and dates. The major areas of your business that will be impact have been listed above, the difficulty comes in defining the details and marrying up the transition process to your current business operations and team. Contact us at Salesworks if you need some help with creating your transition roadmap.

The good news is that there are huge opportunities that await partners that embrace the cloud. Of primary importance to partners today is to start moving forward now.

If you have any questions about this topic feel free to contact Ross Allen at ross@salesworks.com.

Historically, “buyers” have absorbed the majority of the risk associated with their technology and/or application investments; projects were largely delivered on a time and materials basis, software was provided with “as-delivered” caveats and product demonstrations rarely resembled actual out-of-the-box user experiences. IT enabled projects consistently ran over budget and seldom delivered the business value that justified their initial funding.

Moreover, time and materials engagements became blank checks while fixed fee projects were assigned to maniacal project managers that squelched creativity and/or delivered a predictable stream of change orders. Software was as likely to cure on IT shelves for years as it was to be installed on servers; and through it all vendors generated double digit returns while customers experienced 65% IT project failure rates; and, most importantly, unrealized business cases.

The business community has been inundated with incremental requests for ever-expanding IT budgets to upgrade technology solution sets they seldom understood; held hostage by an IT community with risk-riddled arguments they found difficult to challenge. And after decades of broken promises the business and IT communities find themselves wary of each other and poorly aligned.

Enter the cloud:

• trial engines provide comprehensive access to application capabilities PRIOR to engaging vendors in the procurement process
• vertical applications are replacing horizontal solution sets
• hardware/software/services costs are bundled together into easy to understand, predictable monthly subscription fees
• new competitors offer infrastructure-free solution sets to prospects on a pay-as-you-go subscription basis
• infrastructure headaches are replaced with penalty bearing SLAs
• large capital outlays are replaced with monthly subscription fees
• business cases move from long-term ROI to in-year payback
• business buyers are replacing IT buyers

For decades, prospects and customers have begrudgingly complied with a “pay first, benefit later” value proposition and have been rewarded with failed projects and underwhelming ROI.

As technology solution sets increasingly become commodities the ability to switch from one supplier to another becomes dramatically easier; and the penalties and risks associated with making poor technology or application choices is diminished. Cloud computing has provided the buying community with the freedom of choice it has long yearned for, with project risk being clearly passed back to the vendor community; which brings us to the need to revisit our sales engagement approach.

Sales professionals that understand this fundamental shift in risk and control, and can articulate the benefits of that change in terms prospects understand will have a decided advantage over sales professionals that continue to promote traditional on-premise, pay and pray delivery models; which fundamentally increase resistance and undermine the unspoken promise of cloud computing.

And while there are short-term compensation and cash-flow impacts that both partner organizations and individual sales professionals must navigate; the price of resisting the inevitable transition to cloud is too great to ignore. Because while we can look at cloud computing and debate its technical and operational merits as well as the benefits of funding projects with op/ex vs. cap/ex budgets; at the end of the day we cannot ignore the underlying EMOTIONAL buying drivers that will accelerate cloud adoption. Let us not forget that buying is an emotional, not practical, process and that evidence is generally gathered to support conscious or unconscious predisposition or bias. From a prospect’s perspective, cloud migration is as much about regaining control as it is about saving money and reducing complexity.

For partners to successfully and profitably evolve their business practices and processes to service cloud customers they must revisit their current risk profile with an eye towards taking on a greater portion of risk moving forward, and sales professionals must re-evaluate their selling strategies to align with a radically different set of customer buying criteria. The cloud tide has begun to turn and sales organizations with an appetite for increased risk will find their messaging resonate deeply with a new breed of technology buyer.

• Marketing PersonI have a great lead for you. This prospect is perfect, etc., blah, blah…

• SalespersonWhat a waste of my time, this company is not even close to being serious about looking for a new business application…

• Business ownerWho is right and why does this happen?

Consider the Life Cycle for a Business Application (CRM or ERP) at a typical mid-sized company.

Lifecycle for Business Applications

During Phase One and Phase Two are the only times when a company would likely even consider listening to your marketing message about replacing their existing business application. I like to classify companies in either of these two phases as being “open to buy”. By this I mean that given the right message, the right sales strategy, the right budget, etc., these companies would be willing to buy from you or someone like you.

Companies that are currently in Phase Three or Phase Four are likely NOT interested in hearing from you, so let’s focus only on companies in Phase One and Phase Two for the sake of this discussion.

Marketing & selling to companies currently in Phase One is considerably different than those companies that are in Phase Two. This difference is where I often see a huge “language” problem that can surface in many of the partners I have engaged with.

As smarter partners are learning that the use of web-based marketing tends to produce far better results than traditional marketing tactics, and these very same partners are experiencing this “language” issue I refer to more than ever before. Yes, the web exasperates this problem even more. Let me explain.

Phase 2 = Actively Looking

Companies who are currently positioned in Phase Two are actively looking to replace their business application. When your marketing or sales department bumps into this type of prospective company, the conversation is quite simple and very comfortable for most partners. You know the prospective customer company is looking for software and they know they are looking and so the dance begins… By the way, the majority of partners first bump into a prospective company in this second phase.

Phase 1 = Aware of the Problem, Not the Solution

If your marketing team is doing a good job, they are consistently bumping into companies who are in this first phase. Companies who are in early on in Phase One of this life cycle likely do NOT yet realize that they need to replace their existing business application, and this is where the disconnect occurs.

Early in this first buying phase, a company realizes that something is not working and they have some form of business pain. However, they do not necessarily know that to solve their issue often requires replacing their existing business application. This is the source of the problem.

Phase 1 = Marketing, Phase 2 = Sales

If your marketing team is projecting pain-based messaging, they are attracting companies early in this first phase. The company likely bumped into your pain-based messaging and they are interested. BUT, they are interested in solving the business problem / removing the pain, BUT they are NOT necessarily interested in buying new software; this is a huge difference. (BTW, these companies are the “very best” type of potential customers to uncover, but more on that later).

If you want to make a very short sales call with an abrupt ending simply call the prospect and ask if they have a software selection project in progress or just vomit on them about how big / important you are as a software reseller.

If you would prefer an engaging conversation, and hope to stand any chance of progressing this potential deal, you should start the phone call with tell me more about <insert business problem here>…

When your sales team first contacts this type of prospective customer your message needs to be one of I can help you solve your problem. I can get rid of the pain you have. The approach should be focused on what is causing the pain, the impact the pain is having on the business, the cost of having and dealing with this pain, etc.

Building Your Case

By the way, is this starting to sound like we are building a business case as to why the company should consider replacing their existing business application? Absolutely!

Over a relatively short period of time the prospect will begin to realize that their system is the source of the problem and you can present to resolution to the problem, which often they will have to replace an old system. If you have done this well… When they say they can’t afford a new system, you respond with here is the cost of doing nothing about it…. And now a whole different dance begins…

Next time we can talk a bit about why I say prospective companies in the early parts of this first phase make the very best prospects. If you just can’t wait to find out, let me know – bruce@salesworks.com.

Consider the Life Cycle for a Business Application (CRM or ERP) at a typical mid-sized company.

When a business is engaged in Pay-Per-Click, Search Engine Optimization, etc to generate leads the general assumption is that they have a process in place to follow up with and nurture those leads. Unfortunately, this is not always the case and we see a lot of vendors who lack any form of cohesive, stringent follow up / sales process.

What Does Your Follow Up / Sales Process Look Like?

For many partners, their processes for following up with prospects looks something like this:

1. An email to prospect is manually written and manually sent by a salesperson at their convenience.
2. If a phone number is available for the prospect, a single call is made and a voicemail is sometimes left with a message of the salespersons choosing.
3. Sometimes notes are left in their CRM about the contact attempts
4. Sometimes a salesperson might follow up once at a later date.

Your current follow up process doesn’t cut it.

In the above example,

• No structure or methodology = no accountability

• No “multi-touch” process = 7 touches to make a sale is the classic, golden rule

• No automation = opportunity for a prospect to fall through the cracks.

Sending out Newsletters is NOT nurture marketing:

• They are untargeted, unspecific and usually not valuable enough to be read by prospects who aren’t already customers.

• They reinforce your brand to your existing customer base – in our experience they do not win you new customers.

Mass email “blasting” notifications of events is NOT nurture marketing:

• Event notifications should be delivered to prospects based on the products or verticals that they have raised their hand to – everything else is untargeted, inefficient and results in training your prospects to ignore your emails or mark you as a spammer.

What a successful follow up / sales process might look like,

This is a very general guide to how your automated nurturing program might work.

1. Suspect requests gated resource via landing page form, becomes a prospect.
2. Prospect receives branded, personalized response with link to access resource.
3. Partner sends prospect a simple follow up survey 48hrs later:a. Did you find the resource helpful?b. Did it meet your expectations?c. Do you have any remaining questions?d.Would you like an expert to give you a call?
4. 7-14 days after that email the Partner sends a follow up offer that is directly related to the original offer.a. The email contains a link to a gated form which delivers the white paper and requests different information from the prospect:i. Email (pre-filled in automatically ideally)ii. Office Phone Numberiii. Number of Employeesiv. Job Titlev. Buying Timeline

   vi. Etc.

   b. This process qualifies the prospect further for your sales team.

5. Prospect received the white paper, their trust in the partner has increased; the partner has become credible and is positioned well for a phone conversation.a. Your telesales team is notified to call the prospecti. Work with a sales coach to craft an effective telephone script.ii. If they reach a voicemail, don’t hang up – refer to your voicemail script.
6. Repeat sets 4-5 again and again, 7-30 days between touches, ideally at least 7 times
7. Interspersed between these “offers” emails are automated, personalized email asking the prospect:a. If they would like to speak with a software consultant.b. If they would like a quote.c. If they would like a demo.d. If they would like information on a diagnostic.e. Etc.
8. Build out your next nurture campaign for the next core topic (vertical, product, etc).

How To Execute This Strategy For Your Business

This can be a manual process or automated using software ranging from $20 a month to $5000. The concept is the same regardless of the execution.

• If you’re generating prospects already then steps 1-2 should just need some refinement.
• Step 3 could be done via Outlook manually, in a few minutes per prospect, for a small partner getting a few prospects per month.
• Steps 4-7 are more difficult to execute on a larger scale. The process that you build out at this stage is essential to your automated marketing machine and can be used to process/nurture leads from direct mail, bought lists, PPC, SEO, etc. – it’s very flexible.

Depending on your businesses size and objectives, some form of automated follow up marketing system is likely a required investment. However, beware of the labor overhead costs in setting up, maintaining and creating content (emails, resources) for your marketing automation system.

Quick Tips:

• Leverage the power of VisitorTrack to pull contacts for visitors who visited but didn’t convert.
  • Add these contacts into your automated nurture system.
• Once a prospect reaches a specific threshold of engagement (e.g. clicking through on 2 emails), they are flagged to:
  • Send out a set of high impact boxes with a specific desired action.
  • Have your sales team follow up on the boxes.
  • Etc.
• Communication between marketing and sales teams is critical. Everyone needs to be aware of what the strategy is and what the expectations are.

Selecting The Right Marketing Automation Software

There are more than 100 solutions on the market. The process of selecting marketing automation software can be a painful experience – not unlike what ERP vendor’s clients face when choosing business management accounting software for their company.

However, this is a topic for another post.