Sales Funnel Results With Lead Nurturing

Sales Funnel Results With Lead Nurturing

Sales Funnel Results With Lead Nurturing + Demand Generation

(Watch Time – 4:00)

Summary

In this video we explain sales funnel results with lead nurturing, how long it takes to launch a demand generation and lead nurturing engine, and the sales funnel results you should expect running a campaign to 5,000 well targeted buyers.

 

Transcript

Introduction

When you examine the entire sales funnel, lead gen is the first step in the sales process and in the buyer’s journey. Lead gen’s job is to move buyers into the top of the sales funnel by creating awareness and curiosity about your solution. And then demand gen and lead nurturing takeover. Demand generation and lead nurturing automate the pre-sales education process as the buyer goes through their second step of consideration and their third stage of preference. This process keeps the seller top of mind as the buyer moves deeper into the funnel.  And when the buyer’s ready, sales takes over to help them make a decision.

As discussed in other videos in much greater detail, Digital Demand Center specializes in demand gen and lead nurturing to put well educated buyers into your CRM for your sales team to develop and close. And as part of our service, we also support your initial go-to-market strategy, awareness, and lead gen campaigns if you don’t already have a database built or a lead gen vendor or process you trust.

Time to Launch

To fully launch a demand generation engine, including our solution Digital Demand Center, typically takes about three months. In the first month, you can craft your go-to-market strategy, implement your automation systems, and deal with cleaning, augmenting, and building your database. In months two and three, you can run your initial awareness campaigns to generate early stage leads, augment gaps in your sales education content production, access your marketing automation and sales dashboards, start your reporting, and start the ongoing optimization of your marketing tech and campaigns. By month four, you are starting at execute, lead nurturing, and you’re starting to see your initial flow of sales ready leads in your CRM.

Projected Sales Funnel Results

How long does it take to start seeing the results?  So to make the math easy, let’s assume we start your awareness campaign with 5,000 targets. These 5,000 targets will be sent three different messages for the equivalent of 15,000 impressions. So, early in your campaign, you should see about 200 to 400 early stage marketing qualified leads by month four.  Marketing Qualified Leads are defined by demonstrating initial engagement with your content.  They know who you are and the basics of what you do. And if you need to be aggressive, you can start calling these early stage leads.

Then typically by month five, the marketing engine is doing what it was designed to do as the lead nurturing campaigns continue to target your buyers three to four times a month for and additional 15,000 to 20,000 impressions a month. And as a direct result of this pre-sales education, by month five, you should be producing 5 to 10 sales-ready leads a month.  Sales Ready Leads are defined by potential buyers that are engaging with multiple pieces of content, watching videos and visiting key pages that predict that they are getting ready to short list and make a decision.   This number of “Sales Ready Leads” should increase to 7 to 12 by month six. That hat number should hold steady or grow to 10 to 15 sales ready leads by month eight.

Cost Per Sales Ready Lead and Cost Per Conversion

This means that by month eight, with your steady state investment of about $3,200 a month and your launch fee is over, your engine should be producing between 7 to 15 well-educated buyers a month indefinitely. So, this means not counting your startup costs in any additional content costs that by month eight you should be generating sales ready leads at a high-end cost of $450 per sales ready lead, and a cost of $1,000 per opportunity to a low-end of $210 per sales ready lead in a cost rounding up of about $500 per opportunity.

With a closing rate of 33%, this means you should be paying between $1,500 to $3,000 per closed deal. And probably the best news for companies that are committed to lead nurturing and leveraging Digital Demand Center is that once you’ve launched your engine, the only thing that will prevent you from scaling your sales funnel and lowering your cost of sales is your ability to add more targets to the front-end of your engine. Because doubling your targets from 5,000 to 10,000 will eventually over a year or two and into year three, double your sales ready leads, which over time will cut your cost in half after about a year to 18 months of sustained lead nurturing.

Build Marketing Automation Engine Case Study For Software Company – Small Business

Build Marketing Automation Engine Case Study For Software Company – Small Business

Gabriel Sales Helps Scale Company’s Nurture Programs And Sales Ready Leads

Situation

Company had a moderately well-established brand as one of several solutions to the problem they solved for their customer. The sale was not an “if” but “when” and “how” solution, as it was eventually a requirement to remain compliant within the industry.

Historically the company had used cold calling, events and tradeshows to generate business. As a result, they had developed a database of roughly 50K targets representing 60% of the marketing.

During the pandemic their strategy shifted to webinars, industry newsletters, educational articles and a podcast. Company needed to move from Mailchimp and a homegrown CRM to Salesforce and Pardot

They were able to do this quickly because:

  • The CEO and COO were industry thought leaders skilled in both training and public speaking
  • They had a part time event coordinator and two full time content creators.

The company had four full time sales reps that were historically both inside/outside in geographic territories.

The CEO had experience in managing the company but had not previously overseen a sales team or held a day-to-day sales position before founding the company.

Company was using Account Engagement (Pardot) to send one-off emails with specific offers.

Challenge

The company had tried to implement both Salesforce and Account Engagement on their own. They had sound strategic content marketing instincts, great content creators and inbound experts (but PPC was capped at the results it was producing).

The company lacked outbound marketing and senior sales executive and senior sales marketing expertise. As a result they were struggling with implementing best practices to get the most from their CRM, Automation Technologies and their substantial library of existing and ongoing content creation.

  • The company needed to provide their sales team with a sustained flow of leads.
  • The CEO needed the ability to manage that team
  • The company needed visibility into the effectiveness of their marketing efforts and their sales team
  • CEO needed the ability to forecast growth to strategically set growth targets and quotas

Solution

Gabriel Sales was hired to optimize Pardot and Salesforce to ensure that leads were being managed effectively and to create workflows to leverage the company’s content to nurture the database of 50K leads.

Month 1

Gabriel Sales conducted an initial Audit. This allowed Gabriel Sales to:

  1. Confirm the basic system implementation was done correctly and GS was able to start to optimize the systems with about 10 hours of additional work so it was campaign ready and ready to be leveraged more effectively by sales.
  2. Craft a Road Map to leverage their existing system to nurture and score leads
  3. Establish goal for the CRM to:
    • Prioritize leads for sale reps
    • Effectively track sales reps daily activities
    • Increase visibility and ability to forecast the
  4. Define the campaign insights required from the marketing automation platform
  5. Segmentation of database
  6. Establish sales reps workflows in Salesforce
  7. Make long term content and campaign workflows
  8. Define inbound lead form needs

Month 2

Gabriel Sales addressed the immediate optimization priorities to ensure data, workflows and forms were doing what they needed to do.

Month 3

Gabriel Sales systematically took over the day to day management executing a wide variety of functions with best practices. This allowed company to execute, optimize and increase volume systematically — eventually scaling to:

Marketing Operations:

  • Weekly newsletter
  • Nurturing Campaigns
  • Content Management
  • Podcast Management
  • Webinar Management
  • Database Management
  • Segmentation Management
  • Campaign Attribution
  • Social Posting
  • Campaign Specific Reporting

Sales Operations Management:

  • List Views
  • Lead Scoring Prioritization
  • Daily Activity Reporting
  • Forecasting and Dashboards
  • User Management

Reporting and Analysis:

  • Google Analytics
  • Attribution
  • Social Follower Tracking
  • Campaign Attribution

Results

Tactical Results

Gabriel Sales was able to create a technical system, marketing operations and lead transition process that allowed the company to maximize their investment in content marketing, their technology (including additional third-party integrations), database and events.

The Business and Sales Results

The streamlined process, increased visibility for sales management, consistent content marketing to stay top of mind with the buyers and lead scoring allowed the company to double their monthly flow of sales ready leads and simultaneously cut their sales team from 4 sales reps to 2 senior sales reps producing the following results.

About the Company

Company provides both software and training resources to help small and mid-sized companies comply with federal rules and regulations.

The sales is not an “if” decision but a “when” and/or “how” decision.

Building trust with thought leadership and staying top of mind when the buyer is ready to explore options is critical to success.

Typical sales cycle was 90 to 180 days is budget cycle dependent typically with an incumbent or an internal process that needed to be replaced.

Marketing Automation Managed Services Case Study for Enterprise Industrial Products Manufacturer

Marketing Automation Managed Services Case Study for Enterprise Industrial Products Manufacturer

In this Marketing Automation Managed Services Case Study for Enterprise Client with Complex Sales Gabriel Sales  Deployed Salesforce and Account Engagement (Pardot) Optimization + Training and Transition to generate 420 Sales Ready Leads

Gabriel Sales Helps Scale Company’s Marketing Automation Engine from 2 to 24 Campaigns to Produce 420 Sales Ready Leads

Situation

The five-person marketing team was very skilled in brand awareness, creative, strategy, tradeshow & event support, product marketing and inbound marketing. After years of successful event marketing, media and PPC marketing, they had captured and created an opt in database of close to 70% of the existing market.

They made the strategic decision to maximize the value of their existing database and committed to lead nurturing and ongoing buyer and customer education. Simultaneously, they were tasked with developing leads by increasing content education to move them deeper into the sales funnel.

Challenge

No one on the marketing team had frontline sales experience or marketing automation expertise. The team knew how to create great content and great events but had no familiarity with Salesforce, Sales Operations or Marketing Automation Platforms. They were tasked with maximizing the value of their database and their investment in marketing automation tech. They were also tasked to create prequalified sales ready leads to support their Global Sales Team as well as measuring their campaigns, content and efforts.

Solution

After leveraging Gabriel Sales to optimize their Account Engagement (Pardot) Implementation and Salesforce Integration, the Company moved to an ongoing Monthly Marketing Automation and Salesforce Operations Managed Services engagement. Gabriel Sales staffed a blended team of a marketing automation manager, database administrator, email marketing expert, Senior Salesforce Administrator & Pardot Specialist and account manager.

The Senior Salesforce Admin, Pardot Specialist and Account Manager worked with the marketing team turn their nurturing goals, visions and strategies into reality helping the team to:

  • Prioritize a systematic roll out of campaigns
  • Optimize technologies
  • Integrate additional technologies into Salesforce and Pardot
  • Seamless hand-off of leads from marketing to Global Sales team
  • Set up systems for long-term measurement and reporting

Simultaneously, Gabriel Sales took on the day-to-day management executing a wide variety of campaigns including:

Trade show pre and post support:

  • Account-based Marketing Programs to Subsets of the Database
  • Landing Pages for Co-Branded Trade Publication Campaigns
  • General Nurturing Campaigns
  • Event Based Campaigns (Webinars)

Day to Day Tasks Included:

  • Email Templates
  • Landing Page Builds
  • Dynamic Content Builds
  • Form Builds
  • Campaign Workflows
  • Lead Tracking
  • Automations and Completion Actions for Lead Assignments
  • Lead Scoring
  • UTM Tracking and Profiling
  • Testing and QA
  • Data Management and Cleanliness

In Addition, Gabriel Sales Continued to Implement Best Practices and Expand Reporting Capabilities in Quarterly Sprints as More Data Became Available

  • KPIs
  • Data Governance
  • SOPs and How-To Guides
  • Dashboards
  • Quarterly Train the Trainer so tools could be rolled out to Senior Marketers and Sales Teams

Results

Year One Results

Company’s existing marketing team was able to focus on strategy, core competencies and content generation.

Gabriel Sales Launched a Lead Nurturing Sales Ready Lead Process

Company and Gabriel Sales collaborated to introduce systematic content marketing and Sales Ready Lead workflows. This resulted in a 10x increase in New Leads, the introduction of pre-qualified Sales Ready Leads for a seamless hand off from marketing to sales, resulting in 4X the lead conversions in 70% less time.

Scaled Sustainable Marketing Capacity

Gabriel Sales blended team also created the infrastructure, defined, documented and executed multiple day to day tasks leveraging company’s existing technology stack. This maximized their investment in technology, database and content creation. This also created a clear path to ongoing, affordable and sustained sales funnel and pipeline development.

Developed Numerous Measure and Insight Capabilities

Gabriel Sales was also able to provide dashboards, reporting and quarterly reviews to measure:

  • Content attribution
  • Marketing attribution
  • Message measurement
  • Specific campaign ratios
  • Sales team activity dashboards
  • Form productivity and lead source attribution
  • Time to conversions

This allowed the marketing team to make smarter decisions which optimized campaigns and empowered sales teams.

Year Two

After the marketing team’s and Gabriel Sales initial success, the decision was made by CMO and Chief Sales Officer to roll out the program across additional divisions.

Gabriel Sales crafted and documented initial SOPs, Workflows and Best Practices and is currently in the process of scaling to 3 additional Divisions within the company.

About the Company

A building products manufacturer selling with over $2B in annual revenue.

About the Division

Marketing team was responsible for selling engineered materials to building supply manufacturers. Team was tasked with generating new Sales Ready leads and educating existing customers to accelerate sales cycle and increase order sizes.

Lead Scoring Case Study for Mid-Market Client – Building Materials Manufacturer

Lead Scoring Case Study for Mid-Market Client – Building Materials Manufacturer

In This Lead Scoring Case Study for Building Materials Manufacturer​ Gabriel Sales Deployed Salesforce and Account Engagement (Pardot) Optimization + Training and Transition

Gabriel Sales Optimizes Systems to Manage, Nurture, and Distribute 10,000 Inbound leads a month within 3 quarters and then trains Company’s team

Situation

Leadership at a mid-market building products’ manufacturer was responsible for providing both the internal sales group and distribution partners with a constant flow of sales ready leads.

The team was supported by a Marketing Director, Marketing Assistant and Salesforce Administrator. The company worked with several outside media agencies to generate 10,000 plus inbound leads a month. Over time their multi-million dollar marketing budget had granted an in-house database of 500,000 plus targets across the United States.

The marketing team and agency were great at promoting the brand, producing great creative and educational content. The Salesforce Admin had no experience with Account Engagement (Pardot) and the marketing team was experienced in content production but had limited expertise in lead nurturing in the system.

The Agencies were managing content and forms on the Company’s website and on third party sites. Their accountability stopped once the lead was generated.

Challenge

Leadership, Marketing and the Salesforce Administrator had multiple challenges and goals.

  • The team had implemented Account Engagement (Pardot) with no prior experience leading to over design and/or missing solution and as a result the systems failed at volume and scale   
  • There were multiple sync errors
  • Leads were being lost or routed to the wrong reps/distributors, so they were being ignored and abandoned.
  • The company could see what channels were producing the most leads but had limited visibility into what marketing channels and campaigns were producing the highest quality leads and/or which leads were transacting. 
  • The company wanted to leverage account engagement for ongoing market and buyer education with lead nurturing campaigns to maximize their existing database of 500,000 existing leads. 

Solution

Leadership of a mid-market building products’ manufacturer was responsible for providing the General Managers of each product group with a constant flow of sales ready leads. The General Managers then shared these leads with 24 plus in-house reps and 100s of distribution partners with contractually well-defined relationships and territories across the United States and Canada.

Quarter 1

Month One – Discovery, Audit, Scope, Budget, Timeline and Final Strategy

The engagement started with senior leaders, the Salesforce Administrator and Marketing Director to understand:

  • Who is using the system?
  • How are they using it?
  • Lead Distribution Requirements
  • Marketing Teams Background and Area of Expertise
  • Existing Inbound Campaigns
  • Segmentation requirements and what criteria defined a good lead

Gabriel Sales then conducted a system audit with particular attention to:

  • Alerts and Notifications
  • Sync Errors
  • Automations 
  • Grading and Scoring

Gabriel Sale then provided a scoping document with goals outlined and what was required to technically achieve those goals with:

  • Process Gaps
  • Technical Gaps
  • Skills Gaps (Training Required)
  • Recommendations
  • Prioritized Road Map
  • Preliminary Budget

After reviewing this document with the Company, Gabriel Sales provided a one-year plan with timelines and final budget. Company opted for staffing a blended team at a monthly recurring fee to implement and execute the plan (including training of his existing staff).

The plan was organized into four “Quarterly Sprints” with the goal of providing their team with optimized Account Engagement tools and processes deployed as well as have the team trained within the first year.

 

Month 2 – Systems Clean Up and Features Streamlined

  • Gabriel Sales quickly corrected issues related to the initial implementation, so Salesforce and Account Engagement synch errors stopped.
  • Turned on and turned off features.
  • Pre-subscribed additional custom fields to align systems and company and turned-on automated data enhancement with a third party (Zoom Info) to support both sales rep visibility and make lead scoring and lead grading possible.
  • Implemented simpler Form and Form Handler best practices to streamline the flow and distribution of leads

 

Month 3 – Key System Process Optimizations and Training Started

  • Implemented new lead scoring and lead grading criteria.
  • Integrated ZoomInfo to augment and append data to improve grading.
  • Trained existing team in best practices that were implemented.

 

Quarter 2

New workflows, campaigns and processes are implemented and custom training of Company’s team kicked off:

  • Optimized triggered email and alerts.
  • Launched initial drip/lead nurturing campaigns to support one of the product line divisions. Content and strategy supplied by the company’s marketing team.
  • Marketing team went through Gabriel Sales quick start online training program (hosted on Udemy)

 

Quarter 3

Systems and campaigns are scaled with initial reporting for leadership:

  • Gabriel Sales worked with existing marketing team to launch three additional product division campaigns and conducted customized best practice training in their systems.
  • Gabriel Sales worked with leadership of the company to define their reporting and dashboard needs.

 

Quarter 4

Final transition takes place:

  • Gabriel Sales builds the final required custom dashboard and reporting
  • Gabriel Sales moved into a support role answering questions for existing marketing team as they took over the day-to-day management of the systems and campaigns

 

Ongoing

For a modest and affordable monthly fee Gabriel Sales continues to monitor Data Governance on a monthly basis and functions as a support desk for marketing team when any best practices or technical issues arise in their management of the ongoing campaigns.

Results

Gabriel Sales was able to optimize, launch, manage and transition the following tactics and capabilities with the following scaled results in the first three quarters:

Company’s marketing team and Salesforce Administrator were able to take over the day-to-day management of the following best practices:

About the Company

A Mid-Market Building Materials Manufacturer with a National Sales Team of 24 in house reps and 1000s of National Distribution Partners needed to effectively generate and route 10,000 plus leads monthly with strict governance needs.

The entire process was managed hands on by Leadership and a small support team of 2 marketers and one Salesforce Administrator.

Lead Nurturing Drives Sales Ready Leads Success Video

Lead Nurturing Drives Sales Ready Leads Success Video

Lead Nurturing Drives Sales Ready Buyers Success Video

In this short video Collective Goods’ SVP of Sales, Tony Gilio, discusses how lead nurturing drives Sales Ready Leads.  He explains how Digital Demand Center allowed him to increase his flow of sales ready buyers, doubled his closing rate and reduce his Sales Development Rep headcounts cost by over 50%.

(Watch Time – 3:00 Minutes)

Conversation with Collective Goods SVP of Sales, Tony Gilio

Collective Goods was struggling to deliver a full funnel of new business and qualified opportunities to their team of over 150 outside sales reps.  Tony explains how he had Gabriel Sales and Digital Demand Center increase the efficiency of his inside sales team by implementing a digitized pre-sales process supported by a marketing automation technology stack.   In this short video Tony explains:

  • How Digital Demand Center doubled his volume of Sales Ready Leads by 50%
  • How “Sales Ready” leads reduced his telemarketing team from eight to four reps reducing his cost by 50%
  • Why his New Business closing rate went from 10% to 50%
  • How this lead nurturing and demand generation solution provided his closer the volume they needed for success

Excerpts from Lead Nurturing Drives Sales Ready Buyers

“The, the reason why I believe that Digital Demand Center had so much success with us was because they’ve done it from all angles. They are sales professionals, they are marketing experts.  The understand and see the whole business cycle. And, well I guess now they are the whole business cycle for us, right. And they’ve just digitized it and made it more efficient for us to be able to succeed. Their expertise allowed us to be more efficient in our process.”

“So the first step that we had with Gabriel Sales and Digital Demand Center was just streamlining that Sales Development Process.  The reason why we had so much more success is that the buyers we started calling were warmed up. They had already watched videos, they had already seen the content. They had basically told us that they wanted us to call them.”

“I was skeptical that digitizing this would be able to replace, um, all our portion of our telemarketing team. And the reality is really that’s how people want to transact nowadays. They, they are more digitally focused. They are less apt to pick up a call, especially because so many people are on their cell phones. They don’t want to listen to a telemarketer. So they’re transacting on a digital format through video. They’re watching as much as they want to watch. The buyer is learning about us and we are  watching and we’re learning, about their behaviors.   And then we can follow up accordingly”

Software Sales Lead Nurturing Success – A Customer Conversation

Software Sales Lead Nurturing Success – A Customer Conversation

Learn about the 300% Sales Impact Gabriel Sales’ Turnkey Demand Generation Engine drove for a Mobile App and Software Company

In this short video Digital Demand Center’s client – Entrepreneur and Founder Bryan Banks shares his software sales demand generation and lead nurturing success story.

(Watch Time – 5:00 Minutes)

Software Sales Lead Nurturing Success Conversation with Bryan Banks, Founder KipTraq

Bryan Banks is an entrepreneur that is focused on growing his mobile application and software business with no outside investors.  Bryan was committed to fueling that growth with sales and smart marketing decisions. In this short conversation Bryan discusses how Digital Demand Center:

  • Allowed Bryan to to focus on closing business and product development
  • Kept his funnel full with sales opportunities for his existing sales team
  • Educated his buyers so they were excited to talk to sales 

Excerpts – Software Sales Lead Nurturing Success Highlights

 “I didn’t really to focus on the sales side. I have sales reps for that, and they were doing a pretty good job, but I wanted to give them the tools that they needed to be successful. We wanted to be able to be able to scale this business in such a way that, that we could bring in leads digitally instead of having to go out sniffing for them.  And Demand Center filled that niche for us. We were able to really keep that funnel full.”

“Whenever I go buy something, whether it’s a car or a, a new microphone or, you know, from my computer or whatever it is, I do my research online. I think everybody does that these days.  I wouldn’t go to a,car dealership and, and talk to the salesperson and, and cold and say, – Hey, tell me about, you know, the, the pros and cons of these two vehicles, right? I want to come in as an educated buyer. So the thing that really stuck with me after working with Digital Demand Center is that that’s their goal as well. They want to create Educated buyers.”

“So there are three reasons that I would recommend Digital Demand Center. Number one is they’ve got a great technology stack. They helped us move it from an Excel type process into something where we could, we could scale. Number two is that their staff really work well with our team…, they know what it is, what we do, and they’re able to make recommendations in terms of how we should market this product to our potential customers…the third reason I would recommend them is because they’re really focused on educating our potential buyers. So by the time somebody is actually talking to one of our sales reps, they’ve probably seen a couple and read a couple of our blogs. They’ve watched some videos. And so when we are bringing leads in from the outside and moving them through a funnel where they’re educated, they learn what it is that we offer, they get excited about it. So by the time they actually come and are talking with us, our sales reps and myself, they know what it is they want, and they know that KipTraq is something that they need.”