For many marketing teams, what happens to leads after they have been created can be a black box. Visibility tends to be scarce, leaving marketers guessing what is happening to their hard won prospects.
Is sales following up on them? Are prospects engaging? Or have they fallen off the map, which can happen for any number of reasons. Maybe they got distracted or had a busy month, or their priorities shifted. But, if you wait for them to re-engage on their own, you can lose them to the competition.
So how can marketing help impact pipeline conversions?
Targeting Prospects in Real Time
Once you’ve identified the core buying group within an opportunity, it’s important to make sure they’re responsive and engaging with sales reps’ outreach and your marketing programs.
Capturing sales activity data (emails, meetings, files sent, phone calls, etc…) helps sales reps, managers and leadership to understand the health of the deal. It’s also critical for marketers to identify prospects who have disengaged so you can run targeted campaigns, whether it’s direct mail, special offers, display ads or other channels.
How can marketers get their hands on this invaluable data?
Accessing Sales Activity Data
Sales activity data is a treasure trove of information for both sales and marketing. But here’s the problem — it’s not easy to access, let alone accurate.
Reps don’t want to spend their time manually entering every phone call, email, meeting and attachment into CRM. And who can blame them? They would rather be spending time doing what they do best: selling.
However, without accurate and up to date sales activity data, marketers can’t identify the right prospects to hit at the right time, so here are 3 options:
Work with your sales team
Work directly with the sales team to identify which prospects have gone dormant. Unfortunately, most organizations still have siloed departments and systems, which can make this challenging and inefficient.
It may require a lot of manual inspection on both sides to identify prospects who have dis-engaged from both sales touches and marketing programs, pulling your sales team away from focusing on selling to leads who are still engaged.
Inspect the CRM
If you have access, go into the CRM and look for last tracked activity. This won’t require time from sales, but will likely be tedious and manual. Plus, if reps don’t properly track their sales activity, the data won’t be accurate. (In fact, only 47% of businesses have a CRM adoption rate over 90%.) This could result in marketing campaigns targeting the wrong people or potentially annoying to prospects who are already further down the funnel.
Clari
Clari’s Connected Revenue Operations platform automatically harvests sales activity data, so reps never have to input it manually. Those signals are collected to a single source of truth making it easy for the entire revenue operations team to identify prospects who have stalled and are in need of attention. Your marketing team can also gain insights into what actions have been taken so far and monitor the results once a campaign is in effect.
Now that you have visibility into what's actually happening in deals that are in flight, what next?
6 types of marketing re-engagement campaigns
Once you’ve identified prospects stalling or stuck in a holding pattern, now is your chance to run campaigns to unstick them. Here are 6 campaigns that can help you re-engage a business prospect:
Email. Re-engagement email campaigns are perhaps the most popular and easiest way to reach out to a prospect who has gone silent. Marketing can send targeted emails including demos, or case studies.
Targeted social campaign. Social selling influences 50%of revenue across 14 common industries. Marketing can use Facebook Audience Insights or Linkedin Marketing Solutions to target ads at un-engaged prospects.
Targeted display campaign. Similar to Facebook and LinkedIn, the marketing team can use Google Analytics data to target Google display ads at stalled prospects.
Event invite. Inviting a prospect to attend an industry event or an online webinar can be an effective way to interact and reignite their interest, as well as accelerate a deal to close. There’s nothing like a bucketlist type event to get prospects re-engaged.
Limited time offer. Prospects who lack a sense of urgency may spend too long in the consideration stage. By providing a special offer with a deadline—like an end of quarter discount—you can nudge them into action.
Anything free. You can offer a 14-day free trial, a free consultation, or a free product sample. Anything that allows a prospect to try out your product or service with no strings attached can successfully re-engage them. Ever fall victim to the puppy dog close? It works for b2b sales too.
Interested in learning more about how Clari can get your marketing team access to complete and accurate sales activity data? Request a demo.