The first three stages – Discovery, Consideration and Buying
Describe that part of the buyer’s journey that corresponds to the sales funnel. This front-end of the customer journey is the primary focus of sales and marketing as they look to drive top line revenue.
Discovery and Awareness Stage
This is the entry point into your buyer’s journey. It typically starts with a previously unknown individual or company taking some initial action or inquiry related to a product or service. At this stage, the individual may not yet recognize they have an unmet need. This is your opportunity to target them when they research, browse and initially hear about your organization.
Inbound Marketing
Increase Your Visibility And Reach.
Once your new website has been optimized and all your marketing tools have been integrated in one platform. It’s time to reach a wider audience and get in front of the right people immediately in relevant and effective ways. A potential prospect enters this initial stage by conducting some initial research related to a product or service. Early stage buyers’ research is frequently related to solving a problem. They might find a paid ad or blog on tactical content they could use to combat their problems and become aware of their pain points. They haven’t yet developed a preference for your solutions over those of the competition, but they know it exists – they’re aware of it – and that’s a good start.
Through the various inbound tactics:
- Business Blogging
- Social Media Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- Visual Content Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Advertising (Search and Social Paid Ads)
Lead Generation
Generate leads from website visitors and fill your database with interested prospects.
Capture critical information on your visitors to fill your database. The goal is to make it easy to capture interested people’s contact data while they explore your web content. Qualified prospects are on your site. Don’t let them leave without enticing them to submit their contact information in a form. Our automation software offers several methods for capturing the contact information of prospects who have responded to offers or messages and tying directly to the contact/customer database of record.
Through the various lead generation tactics:
- Optimized Website
- Premium Content Creation
- Website Visitor Identification
- Calls-to-Action Design
- Landing Page Development
- Dynamic Forms
- A/B Testing
- Progressive Profiling)
Recommended Discovery Content
Recommended Discovery Content
White-paper
White-paper is a valuable piece of educational content that contains both market and product data, explains methodology or describes a company’s approaches. It can contain both market and product data.
Detailed guide
This content is educational and directed to your product or service. It serves to educate first, promote second. It’s designed in a how-to style so it’s not just educational, but also practical.
Free e-book
E-books are also perfect for evergreen or viral content and as lead assets: once you’ve created an interesting and useful ebook that is related to your niche, you can use it, again and again, for months and even years.
Practical checklist
A checklists can be used to helps identify problems that need to be solved, or as an action list that pushes your target audience to act and use your product or service.
Educational videos
Videos can also be used as viral or evergreen educational content. Videos are can explain and offer solutions to the potential customer’s problems in just a few minutes.
Marketing Benefits
Marketing Benefits
Inbound Demand Generation
Marketing often struggles to deliver sales ready leads – with the right content to qualify opportunities and contacts to increase pipeline
Lead Generation
Fill your database of potential sales prospects with CTAs, dynamic landing pages, forms and content that provides solutions to specific problems
Content Marketing
Consistently deliver highly targeted content that address customer pain points, answer their questions, and leads to increase engagement and conversion rates
Advertising
Deliver ads directly at scale to targeted researchers to increase awareness and consideration with dynamic account targeting and retargeting.
Retargeting Audiences
Target and acquire more customers that exhibit similar behavior as your most profitable customers, and that are most likely to follow in their footsteps across the path to purchase
Marketing Automation
Automate processes and reduce manual touches needed to engage a prospect, build, nurture, and manage relationships to increase conversions and successful outcomes
Interest and Education
At this stage, a lead has moved from the awareness stage and is indicating active interest in learning more about trends or a specific service. This isn’t the time to start your sales pitch, but it’s the ideal time to entice them to engage in real-time human conversations. The goal is to pinpoint what specific benefits they’re seeking. Whether the prospect has the budget and is in a position to make a timely purchase decision.
Lead Management
Maximize Prospect Interest & Engagement
So many leads are lost early in the pipeline, because inbound leads go cold quickly. Businesses frequently place significant resources on generating leads, they neglect to maintain a process in place to follow-up with potential customers as quickly as possible. When all it takes is one moment for them to suddenly want to purchase. Increase the likelihood that they will maintain interest in your solution and a more realistic chance of converting.
Send the right message at the right time to the right person.
To get there, you’ll need a well-executed lead management strategy to simplify alignment between sales and marketing. It outlines the management of inquiries, leads, qualifying, nurturing and routing of each leads with the goal of moving that buyer to the next stage of the sales process. This ensures teams are operating as efficiently as possible. This shifts the burden of lead qualification away from sales letting the sales team focus solely on qualified leads. Which is essential to achieving revenue targets because both departments are responsible for top-line revenue growth.
Through various lead management tactics include:
- Prospect Intelligence
- Lead Scoring
- Lead Segmentation
- Email Marketing
- Workflow Development
- Lead Nurturing
- Sales & Marketing Alignment
- Behavioral Lead Tracking
- Dynamic, Drip Campaigns
- Shopping Cart
Marketing Benefits
Marketing Benefits
Consideration Content: Educating your prospects around consumer pain points according to each buyer’s journey stage
Lead Qualification: Manage the collaboration between sales and marketing on moving that buyer to the next stage of the buying stage.
Lead Targeting: Deliver timely messages to the right person based on any number of attributes
Lead Segmentation: Segment leads from any campaign or channel to send out relevant messages and craft effective campaigns
Lead Scoring: Qualify leads by assigning predetermined values to their behaviors and profile characteristics, across touch points.
Lead Nurturing: Keep new leads in the funnel via a mix of educational and other materials delivered in a timed cadence
Lead Responsiveness: Maintain a process in place to respond to potential customers as quickly as possible.
Lead Distribution: Automatically routed leads to your sales team based on geography, industry, product interest, or other assigned business rules
Content
Whatever touch you use, if you can engage one to one, you’ll have a better chance of inspiring and motivating them to take action. Clear website navigation, strong CTAs, and contact forms making it easy to contact your team from your website. Ideally, deliver content can be personalized to the interests of prospects from industry analysts at this stage as well as your own insights.
- Live chat, messenger bots, and booked calls
- Lead assets and ebooks
- Client success stories and case studies
- Whitepapers
- Webinars
- Retargeting ads
Consideration and Exploring Stage
At this point, buyers begin to eliminate vendors, compare the alternatives and develop a shortlist. They have explicitly engaged with marketing content that may have required them to check some additional boxes on a form. Engaged people know they are in our database, and they expect us to email and communicate with them over time. They start asking questions, might even email to tell you about their problems. The goal is to develop relationships based on value and ongoing communication to help them understand their problem can be solved, how beneficial it will be for them, opening the door for you to propose solutions.
Stay in Touch and Top of Mind
This is the beginning of the sales and marketing funnel. In B2B and B2C, leads are often nurtured for a long time before a purchase takes place. But, the task of engaging with prospects across channels is complex. Marketers clearly can not realistically build relevant, timely, personalized relationships with every sales prospect unless you can automate the engagement process.
We help you to automate a cross channel lead nurturing process that lets you deliver the right message at the right time to stimulate sales engagement with real short term opportunities and develop long-term opportunities.
Through various lead management tactics include:
- Prospect Intelligence
- Lead Scoring
- Lead Segmentation
- Email Marketing
- Workflow Development
- Lead Nurturing
- Sales & Marketing Alignment
- Behavioral Lead Tracking
- Dynamic, Drip Campaigns
- Shopping Cart
Lead Nurturing
Recommended Consideration Content
Recommended Consideration Content
Once again, content can help you convert more people from consideration to the decision stage of the buyer’s journey.
Free webinars
One of the best content types to convert your audience from consideration to the decision stage. Webinars allow you to speak to a bigger audience and create a dialogue between you and your potential customers. It’s a good idea to make your webinar half-educational/half-promotional: start with some useful tips and tricks, and then show how your product helps with the problems they are facing.
Case studies
Case studies are what many potential clients at the consideration stage are looking for, as these are the best demonstration of how your product or service helped other businesses. Case studies help convert like crazy, just make sure they are detailed enough in terms of the niche, the business, the problems, the solutions, and the results. The more elaborate and number-rich your case study is, the better. If you have any case studies – don’t hesitate to include them in your email marketing.
Free samples
People love freebies, and if your business type allows you to send some free samples of your product, don’t hesitate to use them in campaigns. This doesn’t just work for physical products, for digital products it could be free reports, free analysis or anything similar. It’s important to always remind people of the value of your free samples – it should be considered a generous offering, not a random default giveaway of whatever you couldn’t sell. If possible, make your free sample personalized.
Specification sheets
Works best when you need to provide your target persona with more details on your product or service. This type of content is widely used by businesses that sell software, tools, technical services, platforms, automation tools and the like. Make sure to include features, benefits and even some case studies in your spec sheets, not just technical data. A call-to-action to request a specification sheet can be easily incorporated into your email marketing.
Catalogs
Catalogs is a must-have piece of content if you offer multiple products or services. Make it more educational by including use-cases and tips to specifications and descriptions. You can easily put a call-to-action to download or request a catalog into an email.
Marketing Benefits
Marketing Benefits
Consideration Content: Educating your prospects around consumer pain points according to the buyer’s journey stage
Lead Qualification: Our lead qualification process to manage the collaboration between sales and marketing. The goal of moving that buyer to the next stage of the buying stage.
Lead Targeting: Send the right message to the right person based on any number of attributes
Lead Segmentation: Segment leads from any campaign or channel to send out relevant messages and craft effective campaigns
Lead Scoring: Allows marketers to qualify leads by assigning predetermined values to their behaviors and profile characteristics We use our lead scoring based on the prospects’ response, activity and behavior, across touchpoints.
Lead Nurturing: Keep new leads in the funnel via a mix of educational and other materials sent in a timed cadence
Lead Responsiveness: Companies often place so many resources on generating leads, they neglect the processes of following up. So many leads are lost early in the pipeline, because inbound leads go cold quickly. Maintaining a process in place to respond to potential customers as quickly as possible. Increase the likelihood that they will maintain interest in your solution and a more realistic chance of converting.
Lead distribution: Lead information is automatically captured and routed to your sales team based on geography, industry, product interest, or other assigned business rules to alleviate the lead management process. Ensuring that leads are efficiently and correctly delivered to sales.
Sales Level Agreement (SLA):
If leads are qualified buyers, then a sales rep has seven days to either turn the sales lead into an opportunity and have a sales interaction, or to send that lead back to marketing in the target stage for more nurturing
Buying and Decision Stage
At this stage, the buyer determined they had a problem, researched possible solutions, deciding on the most preferred option. The company has had one or more conversations or online interactions with the individual or company. It has determined the lead is a qualified prospect with budgetary authority to make, or at least influence, a purchase decision. This is the crowning moment of the preceding steps.
Sales Enablement
Personalize Engagement for Buyers Needs
The Buying stage directly impacts revenue, so prospects in this stage are sales accepted and are actively being worked by sales. Which should be laser focused on engaging qualified individuals in a personalized way and building a relationship that ultimately leads to a proposal and contract. The goal is to help sales provide value based on a sound understanding of buyer interest, needs, and behavior. By allowing the sales team to focus solely on sales qualified prospects that didn’t convert. But remaining qualified for possible opportunities, results in a higher closing rate and a lower customer acquisition cost (CAC). Sales organizations may begin assessing future cross-sell and up-sell opportunities — when applicable — represent key strategies in this stage.
Sales Benefits
- Increase overall sales, both for new and repeat customers
- Shorten the sales cycle by 50% or more
- Increase deal sizes
- Increase sales quota achievement rates
- Lower the cost per lead
- Lower overall sales and marketing costs across the company
- Increase alignment of sales and marketing teams
Recommended Buying Content
Recommended Buying Content
Your offers for buying stage leads are extremely specific to your product or service.
- Data sheets
- Pricing guides
- FAQs
- Special offers or discounts
- Demos/webinars
- Customer testimonial videos
- Case studies and customer success stories
Recommended Buying Stage Tactics
Recommended Buying Stage Tactics
Re-engaging with Closed-lost Opportunities
- Persuade former customers to reconsider your offering based on improvements that address their pain points
Former Customers
- Email campaigns by product designed to convince former customers to reconsider your offering based on improvements that address their pain points
Long-term Nurture
- Series of emails designed to keep pipeline leads with longer purchase timelines warm.
Trackable Media Center
- Tracking links and automation to notify sales reps when leads engage with content. Automated sales rep reminders to reach out by phone periodically
Follow-up Meeting Emails
- Email drips that encourage leads to schedule other meetings, as needed
- Lead owner alerts when meetings are booked.
- Automated meeting confirmation and reminder emails to improve attendance
Post Sales Meeting Campaigns
- Series of emails by product that dynamically display supplemental information based on lead’s product interest
- Sales collateral by product (e.g. customer testimonials, product feature sheets)
- Trackable Media Center links and automation to notify sales reps when leads engage with content
Sales Team Conversion Tools
- VisitorID email notifications to sales team for follow-up, lead activity alerts to sales reps when leads take (or fail to take.) action
- Smart Mail Library built for conversion with Email Sync for optimal delivery
- Email Digests – Deliver daily/weekly emails of important web visitors to sales team for follow-up
Lead Activity Notifications
- Notify sales reps via text or email when leads take (or fail to take) action, such as:
- Visiting important pages (e.g. pricing page)
- Hitting “read-to-buy” lead score thresholds
- Opening/not opening important emails
- Viewing/not viewing important content, like contract proposals
- Interacting with social media posts
- Completing important forms
Smart Mail Template Gallery
- Set of email templates optimized for conversion that your entire sales team can pick from to send to individual leads
- Email Sync setup by sales rep, so emails are forwarded via IMAP for optimal delivery
What You Can Expect
How You Will Grow?
- Automated lead scoring allows reps to identify and prioritize sales-ready leads based on points scored
- CRM integration centralizes all interest data and histories in one place for sales to engage
- Website prospecting gives sales immediate intelligence about who is visiting the website and what they’re viewing
- Create alerts for salespeople on hot lead activity so they can immediately reach out whenever a lead demonstrates interest in making a purchase
- Use VisitorID to identify anonymous web visitors, and easily create new lead records using the integrated CRM
Built-in capabilities that directly impact sales’ ability to meet and exceed its quotas.
Let’s Discuss Your Priorities
If you have questions or you’re ready to discuss how we can help improve your marketing performance and sales productivity, talk to a Solutions Consultant today. Call 1 (410) 929-2435 or contact us below.