As companies fight to attract more traffic to their websites, it can be easy to forget that a strong, user friendly website is equally as important as SEO.  If users arrive at the website and their visit isn’t optimal, even a high volume of traffic won’t benefit your company.  Your company’s website can be its window to the world and, for many if not most customers, it’s the primary means of communication with potential customers.  As such, it’s essential that a company’s website not just attract new users, but also educate them when they arrive and then capture their information and create a valuable lead.

The first goal of any company website should be to attract new business.  Websites can be an essential element of marketing and it’s important that your website puts your company’s best foot forward.  However, this extends well beyond simple SEO.  Netting the most possible traffic for your website is important, but it’s just as important to keep those potential customers there once they’ve arrived.  This means a careful balance of pleasing aesthetics and SEO.  Your website must look good to the customer without being too overwhelming or busy.  This requires utilizing your sites primary real estate to promote your companies branding.  Short and simple messages about your product will help prime potential customers, and easy navigation will make it simple for them to find what they’re looking for.

Of course, the purpose of bringing new business to your website should be to educate them about your product.  The best method of doing this is, again, keeping it simple.  Don’t make potential customers work for the information they want; keep it easy to access and easy to interpret.  Any potential lead should be able to quickly and easily navigate your site and shouldn’t have any trouble understanding the information provided.  Keep the language broad and simple, avoiding any jargon or lingo that might not be clear to the average consumer.

Finally, it’s important that your website not create interested customers only to let them navigate away without first creating a lead that can be used to generate new business.  Your website should provide a simple form that can be filled out with as much or as little contact information as the lead is interested in providing.  By doing this, your website can find strong leads and create new business.  Not only can you potentially capture new information, but this information will be coming from a lead that willingly provided it.  These leads are already interested in your product and ready to be closed, making these leads extremely valuable.

A strong customer-oriented website isn’t just valuable to your company, it’s also of great benefit to the consumer.  The internet now provides potential customers of almost any industry with a virtually unlimited research tool at the tips of their fingers.  When a website offers the opportunity to leave contact information, the consumer can educate themselves on the product and then, if interested, opt to provide their contact information so that they’ll be contacted in the future.  This makes it easy for customers to identify the product they want and then actively seek them out.

On the whole, a strong company website must attract traffic, keep the traffic there with a well-designed site, make it easy for a potential customer to educate themselves on the products available, and then easily provide their contact information so that they can get in touch with the desired company.  In the end, when companies maintain websites that can do all these things, it’s of enormous benefit to both the company and the potential consumer.

There are a lot of articles on the internet offering strategies to help increase low CRM adoption rates. Here’s an example. A Google search on CRM adoption shows that this is not an uncommon challenge.

Low CRM adoption rates result from the fact that there is a disconnect between the promise of all that CRM can do, and the way it works in the real world. This disconnect manifests in low adoption rates. These low adoption rates are a common enough problem that they attract the commentary of pundits who come with suggestions about how to increase user adoption of CRM.

But trying to adopt these strategies to increase CRM adoption this is just throwing good money after bad. If the adoption rate is low, the solution may not be a fit. You can strategize all day about how to hammer in a nail with a screwdriver, but at the end of the day, you’ll be a whole lot better off if you pick up a hammer.

Customer Relationship Management is often sold to organizations without enough emphasis on what is meant by the ‘relationship’ part. The plain fact is that CRM is not designed to establish new relationships with new customers. CRM is a tool that is does very well what it was designed to do, i.e., manage customer relationships. But establishing relationships with new customers is best done using a lead management system. Among other things, lead management software is designed to help salespeople quickly establish contact with prospects and follow up until they close. In other words, until they change from prospects into customers. When leads become customers, the ‘customer relationship’ begins, and CRM becomes truly effective.

Are you trying to get a CRM to do an LMS’s job?

Here’s an experiment you may be able to do to see if you’re trying to make a CRM do the job an LMS.

It’s easy to see if your agents are using the right tool for the job if your sales team is divided into two types of roles.

New Account Sales

Those who are focused on generating new sales, such as:

• Account Executive
• Field Sales Rep
• Business Development Rep/Mgr

Existing Account Sales

And those who manage existing clients, fulfilling orders, etc…

• Account Manager/Rep
• Customer Service Rep
• Inside Sales Rep

The Experiment: Compare CRM adoption rates between these two distinct types of sales agents. All other things being equal, the salespeople in the second category, Existing Account Sales, have higher CRM adoption rates. For these salespeople, the customer relationship is already established, and the CRM software equips them expertly manage it.

When the salespeople in the first category, New Account Sales, are stalling in their adoption of your CRM solution it is because they are being asked to establish customer relationships with a customer relationship management tool. They are being asked to drive nails with a screwdriver. Salespeople in these types of roles need a lead management solution.

And here’s the good news. It’s not necessary to choose between LMS and CRM.

When you want these two types of salespeople to perform at their peak potential, use both LMS and CRM. In fact, you can use the industry leading Lead Management and CRM tools together. Leads360 and Salesforce.com are fully integrated. This integration enables your New Account Sales team to work leads in Leads360 until they convert. When they convert from prospect into customer they can be exported to Salesforce.com with a single click where the Existing Account Sales team takes over.

Give all of you salespeople the tools they need to do their specific job and see improvement in close rates and retention rates.

Your leads are trying to tell you something. They are holding onto a wealth of information. In fact, your leads have information that is critical to the health of your business. There may be no source of information more directly tied to the effectiveness of your company’s sales efforts than all the information that your leads are holding. It’s a gold mine.

Here are just a few of the things that your leads know:

• Your leads know where they came from, i.e., how they came to be considered a prospect by your company.
• They know if they are a good fit for the product or service you are selling.
• Your leads know how quickly they were called.
• Your leads know how many times they were called.
• Your leads know how quickly and how many times they were emailed, and they know exactly what each email said.

This is only a sample of the information your leads accumulate from the moment they hear the name of your company to the moment they either close or are pronounced dead. Your leads know this and much more; but to sum it up: Your leads know how diligently your salespeople tried to engage them.

Wouldn’t it be great to have access all that information? Imagine how much easier it would be to manage your sales team, allocate leads, adjust your marketing strategy, etc., if you knew what the leads know. For users of lead management software, gaining access to this information requires no further effort or expense. Information about the way that every lead, from every source, has been worked by every sales agent who touched it is all a click away.

Wherever each individual lead has ended up, there are steps that have been taken to get it there. Leads that have closed and leads that have been wasted have one thing in common: They leave behind a trail of bread crumbs showing how they were worked. Are you looking at the trail? Can you afford not to?

Before it was this easy to accumulate and analyze data on sales process, it made sense to manage a sales team with an eye only on the bottom line. As long as they hit quota, their sales process is their own. But now? With robust, affordable lead management solutions available? Why not leverage what has been proven to work?

It seems obvious that it is valuable to know which behaviors bring a lead closer to becoming a deal. But what isn’t always considered is that each lead does in fact leave a trail as it makes its way through the sales cycle. With lead management software, it’s possible to see the trial that leads are on and correct the course as necessary.

The trail of breadcrumbs is there. The only question is; are you looking at it?

When selling any type of product or service, most sales people will argue that your chances of a sale are directly linked to your ability to convince someone of the value or benefit immediately. When a prospect shows uncertainty or does not seem to be very interested, sales people tend to give up because of the perceived disinterest displayed by the consumer. Although focusing your attention on a different prospect may seem be the logical thing to do, Lead360 has always pushed the importance of consistently nurturing these types of prospects in the hope that they will eventually be convinced and then convert.

It’s no secret that studies performed by Leads360 and many other sources have proven that this practice is an effective means of increasing your conversion ratio, but what really the science behind seemingly disinterested consumers making complete “180’s” with their attitudes?

PsyBlog recently explored this intriguing concept in an article entitled “Persuasion: The Sleeper Effect.” In this piece, the author explains how during WWII the US department of War set out to test whether or not propaganda films were actually influencing soldier’s attitudes. Interestingly enough, psychologists found that while they sometimes strengthened the view the soldiers had before seeing the film, “they were extremely unlikely to make soldiers more optimistic about the war in general “(Hovland et al, 1949).

Or did they?

Although the films initially seemed like a failure, “the researchers found that was that some of the films did have an effect on soldiers after months had passed. While attitudes didn’t change immediately, subtle shifts were picked up nine weeks later. US soldiers who watched one film about The Battle of Britain showed little extra sympathy towards the British five days later, but, after nine weeks, they had softened. Yale University’s Carl Hovland and colleagues called this the ‘sleeper effect’.”

This so called “sleeper effect” is a particularly difficult concept for people to grasp simply because it seems to defy common logic. As PsyBlog puts it, “Persuasion should really be strongest just after a message is delivered. Over time the persuasive effect should weaken as people’s attitudes return to how they were before—and this is what many other studies have shown.”

Granted, this may be true, but research has proven that the “sleeper effect” does exist, but just under two types of circumstances.

1. “Big initial impact: the sleeper effect only emerges if the persuasive message has a major initial impact. If it isn’t powerful enough, it won’t hunker down in our minds, biding its time before it boomerangs back.”

2. “Message discounting: it should be obvious that the source of the message can’t be trusted so that we discredit it; like when the soldiers were watching the propaganda film.”

So what does this mean for sales people?

Sales people should always strive to contact consumers immediately after they express interest. By following this approach, you are more likely to convert consumers who are ready to purchase, and make a lasting impact on those who are not. As the sleeper effect dictates, although a prospect may initially discount your message because they haven’t established trust with the source (you), “over time people forget they discounted the information, and the content of the persuasive message, which was processed thoroughly, does its devilish work.”

Besides attempting to contact first, sales people should also consistently nurture consistently over time to try to help the “sleeper effect” take hold more quickly. Subtle reminders can help a prospect along, and can help you close more deals.

(Source: PsyBlog)

This article on the Vision Edge marketing blog advocates turning away from lead based metrics such as ‘cost per lead’ because they are misleading. The author bases her claim in part on a Forrester Research study that  found that “the metrics that most B2B marketers say they use — like number of leads generated and cost per lead” — rank in the lower half of the effectiveness list.” Her larger point is that putting undue emphasis on cost per lead ignores much more important information, such as: Which marketing efforts are resulting in leads that move on in the sales process?

In other words, cheap leads that bring down the cost per lead but don’t close are a waste of time. But placing undue importance on cost-per-lead when measuring ROI incentivizes marketers to waste their time on this type cheap lead generation. This is a keen insight on the part of the author. Her solution to this problem, however, is to focus on marketing metrics that seem much more difficult to quantify.

But another solution is to use a lead management system that enables you to measure the effectiveness of marketing and lead generation efforts from every angle. A lead management solution that has robust campaign management and reporting tools will enable to marketers to slice and dice metrics as needed. Undue attention on cost-per-lead will in fact set off a race to the bottom, but what about being able to measure ‘cost per qualified lead by campaign’, or ‘cost per converted lead by campaign?’ With the right tools it’s possible to measure exactly how well leads from every source are performing; to get feedback in real time about what’s working, and what’s not worth the time and money.

Lead management software puts a whole host of tools in your hand to track the effectiveness of all your marketing efforts.

This article in the New York Times talks about insurance companies using multiple pitchmen in their commercials. It’s long been a strategy with Geico (Gecko, Caveman, etc…), but now Progressive is expanding their cast of pitchmen. Previously it’s been only “Flo” the cheerful insurance super store lady. Their new character is a mysterious, styled-from-the-‘70s guy named “The Messenger.”

The reason for having multiple pitchmen, the article states, is to keep viewers entertained enough so they don’t disengage. And to reach different types of customers. Flo is more likely to affect the opinions of people already shopping for insurance, or at least thinking about it. “The Messenger”, conversely, is designed to be the personification of conversations people have about insurance. “He is word of mouth.”

Will “The Messenger” be as effective as Flo? We shall see. An interesting thing about this approach is that the desire to court different types of customers with different spokespeople is favored above the more traditional approach of having only one pitchman for the company. Concerns of diluting the brand are put aside in favor of a multi-faceted marketing approach.

When insurance agencies use lead management software it is possible to try different means of engaging customers and get very clear evidence about what works and what doesn’t. Lead Management Software that has campaign management and reporting tools enables insurance agencies to see how well their marketing efforts are working. Not just overall, by looking at the bottom line, but piece by piece. Which emails are people responding to? Are they engaging through the website? Which page?

Most people who sell insurance, or sell anything, have developed a way of doing it that works. “The way that works” probably includes approaching different types of customers with different types of messaging. With lead management software it’s possible to apply that approach to email marketing, leads generated from your website, local advertising, etc. The insurance companies are using multiple pitchmen to advertise at the national level.  At the local level, it’s possible for agencies to take a page from that book and experiment with multiple messaging strategies and get very clear feedback about what’s working and what isn’t.

I came across this article on entrepreneur.com by Kim T. Gordon called “Seven Ways to Energize Sales.” It’s a good article and all of Ms. Gordon’s tips are good. Taking her advice is easier and can be done be so much more effectively using a lead management solution that has campaign management and reporting functionality.

In light of that, I’d rearrange her list a little bit. “Polish Lead Management” appears at number three on Gordon’s list. In my opinion, not only should Lead Management be number one on the list, but all the other items should be subsections under the heading “Polish Lead Management.” If “Energizing Sales” includes “getting new customers” then there’s no question, lead management software should be at the top of the list. There is no more effective tool for converting prospects into customers.

So how would I rearrange this list? Instead of “Seven Ways to Energize Sales” I’d put all these activities under the heading of lead management and re-title the article, “Seven Ways That Campaign Management in Lead Management Software Can Help You Energize Sales.” Admittedly, my title is not quite as pithy. But here goes my re-worked list.

1. Use Lead Management Software

1a. Reestablish Listening Posts

In this item, Gordon talks about the importance of getting feedback from your customers; getting to know them. Great idea. But how are you going to know how much value you are getting through these channels unless you have a way of measuring the conversion rate of leads generated from this source. With lead management software, measuring the value of leads in a given campaign is quick, easy and accurate.

1b. Announce Special Promotions

So which special promotions are working? Which methods of announcing them are working? You won’t know unless you have a way of tracking your lead generation efforts.

1c. Focus On Fresh Ideas

Put your whole company in charge of innovation. More solid advice. But whose ideas are working? Do you want to see the numbers? Lead management software is going to deliver all that information with real time campaign reporting.

1d. Renew Retention Campaigns

Drip email and direct mail campaigns are a cinch to set up and track with lead management software. And how well is it working? Which content gets results? You’ll know if you track your campaigns with Lead Management Software.

1e. Enhance Your Giving

In addition to being a good thing to do, corporate giving can generate leads. How many leads, and of what quality? Manage your campaigns with lead management software.

1f. Freshen Your Content

Track incoming leads from all your content sources. Some of your content is driving traffic to your company’s website. Which content? And which content is getting the attention of serious buyers? Use lead management software to keep evaluate your lead content driven lead generation efforts.

So yeah. There is a lot of good advice out there on how to increase sales. When you read some of it, it’s like a lightbulb turns on inside your head and you can’t wait to incorporate it into your sales strategy. But unless you have a way of tracking what works and what doesn’t, you’re really engaged in a kind of blind experimentation.

Implement all your ideas. Try out advice. Play your hunches. And use lead management software to track your campaigns to see how well they work.

Where should I get leads?
If you are an online lead buyer who’s not sure where you should buy your leads from, you’re in luck. The short answer is that you should be using lead management software. Some lead management software providers have as many as 25 million leads under management and are integrated with 1400 lead providers. Working with such a company will give you the opportunity to benefit from a wealth of expertise that can help you get started with the right lead providers. If you generate your own leads through your website, direct mail campaigns, or cold calling; you can hugely benefit from lead management software. See which marketing campaigns are effective and which are not. Create campaigns in your lead management system to measure how the leads they generate are performing.

How should I distribute leads among my team?
Lead management software makes lead distribution a powerful tool in improving close rates. If you are passing out leads round robin you can benefit hugely from lead management software provider with a robust distribution engine. Being integrated with 1400 lead providers is the first part of what makes the lead distribution engine so powerful. When leads are instantly posted to your lead management system, they are instantly distributed to your sales agents by distribution programs that assign leads according to configurable rules. Monitor the rules and the success of your different distribution programs to fine tune them; so that each agent gets leads according to his expertise. And of course, whenever it’s an issue, everyone is getting leads that they are licensed to handle. A state of the art lead distribution engine puts the right agent in touch with the right lead right away.

What’s the best way to work leads?

Some lead management solutions are designed around best practices that are always being improved by ongoing research and analysis. This means that using the software aligns your sales process with proven methods. Lead management software can be customized to meet your businesses unique needs, but the out of the box solution is developed not just by software engineers, but by industry experts, sales strategists, and business practice consultants. A proven and enforceable sales process is easy to adopt across your entire company. Such solutions make use of configurable tools such as lead prioritization, drip email campaigns, click to call that increase agent productivity and accountability.

How do I know if the leads are being worked?
With lead management software, it is easy to see which of your lead sources and sales agents are underperforming. And with that knowledge, it’s easy to improve your sales process over time, using agent and lead performance data that is displayed in built in reports. Which agents have the best success with which types of leads? Know now, and re-distribute your resources as necessary. Make decisions based on data, keep your company running clean, and keep close rates at their highest.

Bonus Question: What is at stake?
Everything is at stake. Profits are at stake. The growth of your company is at stake. Market share is at stake. If you like buying leads from lead sources that have a poor ROI, and having sales people on staff who are not following your strategic sales process, then you should be comfortable without lead management software. But if you want a crystal clear, real time picture of what works, and what doesn’t, lead management software is the best suite of tools for staying on top of your sales team, your sales process, and marketing spend.

Last night I did my first radio commentary on the Sales Lead Management Radio show. I think it went well, but I didn’t have any live feedback, so I’m not sure. Here are the recording and the transcript.

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Good afternoon. My name is Jeff Solomon. I’m the founder of Leads360; lead management software for B2C companies. I’m pleased to be participating in this radio program today and want to thank Will for having me back on.

Today I’m going to talk about B2C vs. B2B sales. And I’m going to ask the question, what’sthe difference, and why does it matter?

I’ve got 7 minutes, so here goes.

A leads a leads a lead right? It doesn’t matter if you sell Snuggies to couch potatoes or network firewalls to Fortune 500 companies; if someone is interested in your product, they’re a lead… right?

Yeah, I guess that’s true, but there’s a big difference between consumer leads and business leads. And when it comes to the tools you use to manage your leads, there’s an even bigger difference.

So I guess the answer to my question is, no, leads are different; and yes, it matters what you’re selling to them.

Ask yourself these seven questions which are applicable to both in B2C and B2B sales; and then let’s compare the differences.

1. How fast is your sales process? How long does it take to convert your leads? A day, a week, a year?
2. How many people are involved in making the decision to buy your product?
3. Are the products or services you sell straightforward or ultra complex?
4. How many leads do each of your sales people get every day or every month?
5. Does emotion play a role in the buying process for your customers?
6. Are you selling big ticket items or simple widgets?
7. Are the things you sell pretty much the same or can they be customized?

Ok, so let’s go back to my example from before, the Snuggie vs. the firewall;

1. Speed of the Sales Process

• Suggies are a one call close; “hi, are you ready to buy, yes, great, give me your credit card…
• Firewall, “oh, you’re interested in a firewall, we better have a discovery call first… and this is gonna take a while.”

1. Number of Decision Makers

• Snuggie, just one dude on his couch eating potato chips
• Firewall, CTO, CIO, IT Manager, Director of Technology, Procurment, etc.

1. Simplicity of the Buying Process

• Snuggie, come on, it’s a blanket with arms, enough said
• Firewall; when was the last time you tried to configure a Cisco product, forget about it?

1. Quantity of Leads

• Snuggie, one 5 minute spot generates thousands of inquires
• Firewall, “what, we did that whole tradeshow and you only got 5 leads?”

1. Role of Emotion

• Snuggie; “gosh that looks comfy; I sure would feel a lot better about not going to the gym if I was hanging out in that thing all day.”
• Firewall; [ROBOTIC] “Yes we need a firewall, it must do X, Y and Z or it won’t be effective for our needs…” you get the picture.

1. Value of the Sale

• Snuggie; $9.99 Bam!
• Firewall, um, thousands of dollars… hundreds of thousands of dollars?

1. Uniformity of the Offer

• Snuggie; “well we’ve got red, blue, green and cowprint”
• Firewall; bells and whistles galore

Alright, I think the difference is pretty clear, so how does all this apply to the tools I we use to manage leads? As long as I have lead management software, I’m all good, right?

For those listeners who are on the solution provider side, like me, you might be slightly blinded by the fact that we all call our solutions the same thing; and we expect clients to understand what we mean. When Marketo and Eloqua say “lead management” they mean one thing; but when Leads360 or LeadMailbox say it, we mean a totally different thing. Even companies like Salesforce, Constant Contact, TargusInfo, and all these other guys have a totally different definition of lead management; jees, it’s become such a ubiquitous term I don’t even know what it really means.

Going back to those 7 characteristics of sales and marketing again. If you think about it, the difference between selling Snuggies and firewalls is so significant it just makes sense that the sales tools would be different as well. And that’s the truth, they are. That’s why when companies say “we do lead management” it’s true… and it’s not true.

Let me break it down a bit more. If the speed of your sales process is quick you need tools that are velocity driven, that focus on repetition and consistency. Things like auto dialers, sophisticated lead routing and configurable workflow engines. If the process is much slower you might need something to monitor the website behavior of your prospects does to gauge where they are in the buying cycle.

When there are a lot of decision makers in the process you need a system that allows you to create an org and attach a bunch contacts to it.

When the buying process is pretty simple you might need a scripting tool or a pre-defined sales workflow. And if it’s much more complex then you probably need detailed product documentation, use cases, demos, vides and all that jazz.

Got a lot of leads, you need a system that can prioritize them for one by one follow-up; in other words, “just tell me which lead to call next”.

If emotion plays a role, then maybe you want to do some type of skills based routing to align Joe the couch potato with the sales rep that has actually seen every episode of the Honeymooners.

Cisco firewalls can be pretty pricey; if you’re selling expensive stuff be prepared to build customized pricing proposals and business cases. If Joe simply needs to skip one meal to pay for the cowprint Snuggie, well he’s probably pretty used to that.

And if the only customization you offer is what color to choose, you won’t need a sales engineer with shared access to the record in your CRM.

So the moral here is – know what you sell. Understand specifically what the problems you need to solve are. Look at your sales process and ask yourself the questions I posed in this commentary. And then find solutions that align with those needs.

When it comes to sales and marketing, there just isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution out there; sorry Salesforce.

I think the best companies you’ll run into know what they’re good at and know what they’re not. Staying focused, even if that means having a slightly smaller market, allows you to be the best. And when it comes to finding solutions to help you maximize sales, why wouldn’t you want to the best?

And that’s all I got.