To expand on some of the important concepts Mike discussed in the Cookbook, I asked him to answer 5 questions to help you understand the importance of leveraging personalized outreach along with marketing automation to improve your success. In the Lead Nurturing Cookbook , we offer a recipe for managing and qualifying inbound leads using your marketing automation platform. EM: What role does telemarketing play in qualifying inbound leads and why is this role critical to the process? They warmed themselves up for you, so don't make the mistake of treating it as a cold call. MORE >>

Content should be objective, personalized, and delivered in a simple, clean format. In the b2b world of long sales cycles involving multiple decision-makers and influencers, sales funnel leakage is one of the most challenging issues Sales and Marketing face. It occurs when Marketing Qualified Leads are passed to Sales but do not actively enter the sales cycle, and as a result, fall out of the funnel. Why should reducing funnel leakage be a top priority for organizations? Lead Scoring models help your sales team prioritize leads that are ready for action. MORE >>

The film goes through a list of dating scenarios, in which one person should get the hint the other person is blowing them off but doesn’t. Many of you have seen the 2009 film He’s just not that into you. For those of you that haven’t, bravo – it was terrible. However, the premise of the movie resonates with most of us because we may have been on one side or the other. Similarly, in the sales process, there are often telltale digital signs that a seemingly viable lead is just not that into you. Lead Scoring models help your sales team prioritize leads that are ready for action. MORE >>

At this point, your sales rep should have close personal contact with the recipient - the content should be as personalized as possible and appear to be a communication directly from the sales rep. A few months ago in our weekly meeting, I asked my sales team how Marketing could help them communicate with leads already in their pipeline. They answered, “we’d like to be able to select a lead nurturing process based on where the leads are in their buying process. This is a common scenario for many sales teams, especially those selling complex solutions with long buying cycles. MORE >>

Knowing how they interact with your content, how often and the length of time they spend with it can provide compelling evidence that they may be ready for a personal conversation. If you review your recent customer’s profile history and see a common activity—like viewing your online demo —as a precursor to sales conversations, then the score should reflect that transition in interest from browsing to buying and be set to trigger personal follow-up. When a Lead hits the threshold set by the model, they can automatically be updated in the CRM for sales pursuit. Interest. minutes.  MORE >>