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Not All Leads are Created Equal

Posted by: cmaeon in strategy, ROI, conversation marketing on Oct 26, 2010

not equalAccording to most sales experts, no matter how many leads you receive only 2% of them are ready to buy right away.  At least 25% of your leads will turn out to be no good, and the other 73% will need a whole lot of nurturing, coaching and maybe even cajoling to get them to a point where you’ll know if they’ll convert to sales.

Nobody ever said the business of selling was easy – so how can you make your lead management more efficient and cut down the amount of time your sales staff (or you) are wasting on go-nowhere leads? Here are the top 4 tips to improve your lead management and fine tune your sales processes!

1. Start with better leads
That’s not just a glib piece of advice! Which is more efficient -trawling the entire ocean floor and spending hours picking garbage out of your nets, or only hooking the specific the type of fish you want by using the bait they like best? By pursuing quality leads and making sure they’re qualified buyers ahead of time, the quantity of leads you bring in might be lower, but you’ll spend far less effort trying to convert them. That’s the iQ3 Rule.

2. Talk it Out & Lead the Discussion
People usually don’t know what they want right away. Don’t just present them with your sales options; take the time to ask a lead what they think they need from you, and what they want as the ultimate goal. Don’t turn yourself into a free consulting service - become a trusted advisor and a thought leader in your area of expertise. If they’re still researching their options, give them the advice they need and see if they come back. Chances are, if you look like the experts in your field, they will.

3. Pay attention to what they’re doing.
With the tools available to you today, there’s no reason to be in the dark about what your clients are thinking. It’s easy to know if they’re downloading your white papers, clicking your links and reading what you send them.  If they’re opening, reading and responding – pay more attention to them, but if they’re not looking at your product pages, or they haven’t done anything since watching the webinar, downgrade the lead and cut your losses. By knowing what your leads are doing, you can use your time far more efficiently.

4. Know your leads and your customers
It’s not rocket science to know you want more leads like the customers you already have – so set up landing pages to help you capture the information you need to know ahead of time. For example – your company sells safety equipment to a huge variety of people all over the world. If you know what industry the lead is in you’ll be able to recommend products other customers in their industry have asked for and know what they’re not interested in.  Knowing more about your leads means you can analyze what works and what doesn’t based on the demographic or industry information you keep.

There you go – 4 simple ways to save yourself time and earn more money.  The best thing about this advice is it’s all free. It doesn’t cost you anything to manage your leads better, and you don’t need CRM software to do it. The tools that can help you are all available for free online.

Photo: Not all leads are winners - separate the wilted flowers from the fresh ones. Photo by David Goehring, Flickr.

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Why Measuring Social Media ROI Matters (and why it doesn’t!)

Posted by: cmaeon in social media, ROI, conversation marketing on Sep 8, 2010

measuring cupsOne of the most important things any business is measurement. You have to know if you’re spending money wisely. We at CMAEON think it’s important too - so important we list Measurement as one of the three “Ms” you need to make your business effective.

However, the question that comes up a LOT is how can you measure the ROI on social media?  Are you reaching customers or just making noise?  Sure you can measure how many people are clicking your links thanks to platforms like Hootsuite, but how many clicks does it take? How many friends or followers are real, passionate brand advocates? How much do you have to engage before you make the sale?

Unfortunately, there isn’t a realistic scale for measuring how effective each click, friend or follower is. Each of those measures represents an individual.  As anyone in sales knows, everyone needs a different level of comfort before they are willing to buy your product.  So does that mean you can’t measure ROI at all? Is social media just a black hole?

Digital Media Analyst Brian Solis wrote a very in depth article about a study Bazaarvoice and the CMO Club recently conducted a survey on social media.
Almost all the Chief Marketing Officers surveyed indicated they wanted measurable ROI out of their social media strategies. 53% were unsure of their return on Twitter, and 15% believed there wasn’t any ROI. 1 in 10 figured there was no ROI from LinkedIn or Facebook.  HOWEVER, those same CMOs reported a 400% increase in twitter comments to inform decisions about products and services, a 59% increase in customer reviews and ratings and a 24% increase in the use of social media for pre-sale Q&A.

So… how can you know that people are talking about your product, but be unsure of the value of the medium where they’re talking about it? It all comes down what you’re actually trying to measure.

Driving a conversation around your brand creates awareness and back of mind recognition. It might not create a sale every time (or even every 1 in 100 times) but it provides value all the same.  If customers feel they can trust your brand and trust the people behind it, when they do want to make a purchase the awareness is there, no matter what the product. Every marketer in the world will tell you that brand awareness is something to strive for. You could make anything from software to soft drinks and still need to make people familiar with your brand.

So, of course you should be measuring social media! Measure it quantitatively: how many people are talking, where they’re sharing and who they’re telling. But keep in mind your social media goal shouldn’t be to drive sales, it should be to drive conversations and awareness. Social media is conversation marketing; it expands awareness, engages people and creates personal relationships between consumers and brands. The worth of a real, one on one relationship is almost impossible to measure, but that doesn’t mean it's not valuable.

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