A sales lead is the identification of a person, or entity that has the interest and authority to purchase a product, or service. This is the first step in the sales process. The identification of the sales lead is referred to as Lead Generation: a process conducted by either the marketing or sales organization.

The sales lead can be business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C). There can also be generic sales leads e.g. a person signs up for a type of offer, instead of a particular company or brand. Sales leads come from either

Sales Lead, B2B, B2C and Conversions

lead generation company processes such as trade shows, direct marketing, advertising, Internet marketing, spam, gimmicks, or from sales person prospecting activities such as cold calling, or making a connection through a social network.

Most businesses have a qualification process for a sales lead to qualify as a sales prospect. Generally, the process involves identifying by direct interrogation the lead’s product applicability, availability of funding and time frame for purchase. This qualification process also guides the entry point of a sales tunnel, sales funnel or sales pipeline.

There is a wide range of different products centered around sales lead generation. Quality depends on how the leads are sold and what the lead companies’ policies are for buying Internet leads. For example: Exclusive Internet leads are sold to one company, but depending on the company may be sold again the next day as a shared lead. So, the shared leads are sold to multiple companies. The more that one lead is sold the lesser it’s value.

The huge data on the social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+ etc., is giving insight into prospective clients. Social Data aggregation sites such as Namegeneration.net, Infousa.com, and Spoke.com are making it easy to buy this data for use in sales, marketing, and recruiting.

Once a qualified lead exists, additional operations may be performed such as background research on the lead’s employer, general market of the lead, contact information beyond that provided initially, or other information useful for contacting, evaluating a lead and for elevation to prospect status, the next sales step.

If a sales lead eventually makes a purchase, this is called conversion and a closed sale. The ratio of sales leads that convert is often referred to as the conversion rate, a way to measure the effectiveness of a sales process, sales team, or sales person.

Sales Lead Generation | Performance-Based Marketing Automation

There are various advantages and problems of Internet marketing. The most obvious advantage of Internet marketing is that it is an inexpensive approach to reaching a specific target audience at low-cost. Internet marketing allows companies to reach a wide audience for a small fraction of traditional, or offline advertising budgets.

Internet marketing provides another advantage in consumer education i.e. consumers can research and share their experiences with others about specific

advantages and problems of Internet marketing

products and/or services very conveniently. This medium can bring faster virtual results as compared to the other forms of marketing efforts.

Businesses have not always been able to provide exact statistics for their marketing campaigns, but Internet marketing provides exact measuring statistics easily and inexpensively. Individuals can trace and measure all aspects of an Internet marketing campaign to determine the best ROI.

With relevant analytic and stats businesses now have the option to choose, campaigns that fit well into their marketing budget and ROI goals, from the various methods for Internet marketing such as pay-per-impression, pay-per-click, social media, search engine optimization, blogging etc.

Problems of online advertising

The use of online advertising has implications on the privacy and anonymity of users. Hosting the banner images on its servers and using third-party cookies, the advertising company is able to track the browsing of users across these two sites. However, most browsers are now able to increase privacy and reduce tracking by advertising and tracking companies, without negatively affecting the user’s Web experience by blocking third-party cookies. Many advertising operators have an opt-out option to behavioral advertising, with a generic cookie in the browser stopping behavioral advertising.

Some businesses/advertisers use illegal and unethical ways to promote their message. These include external applications which alter system settings (such as a browser’s home page), spawn pop-ups, and insert advertisements into non-affiliated webpages. These applications are usually labeled as spayware or adware. These programs are designed to dupe the user, acting effectively as Torjan horses. Many users find them very difficult to remove or uninstall. The ever-increasing online users, many of whom are not computer-savvy, frequently lack the knowledge and technical ability to protect themselves from these programs.

Spam is another problem with Internet marketing. Many Internet products are outright scams, or are promoted with deception making it difficult to know which offering has true value.

Security is an ever-growing concern with the Internet marketing. Many consumers are hesitant to purchase items over the Internet because they do not believe that their personal information will remain private. Almost all online businesses have a privacy policy, but few seem to be following their own policies. Many customers are unaware if and when their information is being shared, and are unable to stop the transfer of their information between companies if such activity occurs. Additionally, companies holding private information are vulnerable to data attacks and leaks.

Sales Lead Generation | Performance-Based Marketing Automation

Some websites started to create valuable content and provided tremendous benefits to their visitors and naturally these website owners wanted to be

What is affiliate marketing

compensated for their hard work. Early forms of online advertising like CPM or fixed placement started seeing competition from emerging, more accountable forms of online advertising, like affiliate marketing.

For an answer to what is affiliate marketing, in a nutshell, affiliate marketing is about relationships, a relationship between three parties which include: (a) Advertisers, (b) Publishers, and (c) Consumers.

Advertisers:

In the world of affiliate marketing, an advertiser is generally a company that is selling a product or services. There is a cost for advertisement in the case of affiliate marketing. All the advertisers who want to promote their business must be ready to pay other people who help them to sell their product or services.

Publishers:

One of the most important elements of the affiliate marketing triangle is the publisher who can be an individual, or a company. The publisher promotes advertiser’s products and or services in exchange for earning a commission. It is the responsibility of the advertiser to provide the publisher with creative such as links, banners or text etc. for him/her to incorporate these creative into his/her website.

Consumers:

The last element to complete the affiliate marketing triangle is the consumer. The consumer is the one who actually sees the ad and then makes an action (either by clicking a link or by submitting their information via a form) that takes them from the publisher’s website to the advertiser’s to complete the action, which we call a conversion.

Sales Lead Generation | Performance-Based Marketing Automation

What are the types of Internet marketing?

The Internet tends to expand more and more. Advertisers have been attracted towards this medium since it is a productive source to bring in consumers. The best advantage with online advertisement is that it gives control and visibility both to the consumers and the advertisers.

Online advertisements may also offer various forms of animation. In its most common use, the term “online advertising” comprises all sorts of banner, e-mail, in-game, and keyword advertising, including on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. Web-related advertising has a variety of ways to publicize and reach a niche audience to focus its attention to a specific group. Advertisers are switching more towards online advertisement than offline even the offline advertisement is directing the consumers towards online advertisement. For the year 2012, Jupiter Research predicted $34.5 billion in US online advertising spending.

types of Internet marketing

Internet marketing is broadly divided into the following types:

• Display advertising: this is the use of web banners or banner ads placed on a third-party website or blog to drive traffic to a company’s own website and increase product awareness.

• Search engine marketing (SEM): this is a form of marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of either paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion, or through the use of free search engine optimization techniques also known as organic result.

• Search engine optimization (SEO): this is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.

• Social media marketing: this is the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

• Email marketing: this is about directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using electronic mail.

• Referral marketing: this is a method of promoting products or services to new customers through referrals, usually word of mouth.

• Affiliate marketing: this is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts
  

• Content marketing: this is the process of creating specialized content such as infographics, blog articles and ebooks to attract more customers.
  

• Inbound marketing: this involves creating and freely sharing informative content as a means of converting prospects into customers and customers into repeat buyers.

• Video marketing: this is the type of marketing specializes in creating videos that engage the viewer into a buying state by presenting information in video form and guiding them to a product or service.

Sales Lead Generation | Performance-Based Marketing Automation

CRM is a model for managing a company’s interactions with current and future customers. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize sales and marketing, customer support and technical support departments.

CRMs are built with complicated processes, involving sophisticated computer technology. When used correctly a CRM can identify what customers need and then systematically align demand generation processes to meet those needs in a timely manner. A great CRM provides transparency; streamlined processes and can generate actionable information for your company.

The core objective of CRM is to develop streamlined business processes and increase sales.

CRM and its Advantages

There are many advantage of using a CRM, including but not limited to:

Centralized data storing and data access

CRM helps companies save resources and generate actionable information. This helps the whole company including: sales, marketing, customer services, accounting, service delivery and Management etc. CRM’s allow these

departments to all use data from a centralized location and maintain their notes from within the same place. This results in structured, automated processes throughout your company.

360-degree view

CRM provides you with a 360-degree view of your entire business growth pipeline such as: appointments, tasks, telephone notes, correspondence, sales opportunities, complaints, orders, delivery notes and projects. This will cause your employees to be well informed and your customers to be taken care of.

CRM AND ITS ADVANTAGES

Value of information

In CRM’s all of the interactions between your customer and company have been stored and tracked. You have access to all valuable information in one place. In this way, you can know what your staff is doing and you can cater to the needs of your customer. Also, since you have customer’ segments and reports and know their historical buying capacity your sales team can plan and implement campaigns according actionable data regarding a particular customer segment.

Customer retention

There are many success stories where use of a CRM System has helped companies increase their customer retention and increase business growth. CRM systems have led to better organized business processes.

Sales Lead Generation | Performance-Based Marketing Automation

How I can avoid failure to my small business

avoidable risks, which you should keep in your mind while planning to start your own small business. Some of the major reasons for small business failure have been provided hereunder:

Business Plan

It is not enough to know your product/services and your potential customers, but you also need to take into account many things which should be a part of your business plan. These things will include but not limited to:

1. Your business goals,
2. Your target market,
3. Resources for your business (labor, production, finances etc.), and
4. How to sell (sales and marketing).

If you already have taken into account the aforesaid things then there you will be well prepared to face the challenges.

Education and Training

A business combines many things together such as management (financial management, employees’ management etc.), business development (sales and marketing), service delivery, customer relationship etc. Generally, you will not have the experience of all the business aspects when you start your own. You must take some time out to educate yourself through business and finance courses.

Wrong Financial Forecast

Many people think that they will start making money from the point GO but almost everyone comes to know that it is not that easy. So, it is most important to have enough funds to start the succeeding cycle. You must consider every possible cost (overhead, production, equipment, etc.) and save enough money that can be used for at least one fiscal year despite poor sales.

Online is the Must

Today, people expect to find just about everything on the Internet with their computers and mobile devices. If, you are not planning to have a website, or at least a social media page as well as no strategy to stay visible for your customers then it will render your business virtually invisible to a great majority of your customers’ population. If you do not know much about Internet marketing then you can hire professionals to make sure that you are visible online to your customers.

Financial Management

You cannot run your business without cash. It is imperative that you have a strict control over financial record-keeping and every penny is duly accounted for. You must know exactly how much money is going in and out of your business this will correctly guide every decision you make.

Business Development

Since, you are starting a small business you will have to compete against more established businesses. You have to be wise enough to promote your products/services through the right channels. You have to consider both online and offline channels to develop your business.

Finally, if you want your small business to be a success, you have to be focused on planning out your overall strategy, know your own strengths and weakness, and keeping a good eye on all of your resources.

Prospectr Marketing

Sales Lead Generation | Performance-Based Marketing Automation

Researchers estimate that United States firms alone spent US $1.51 billion on email marketing in 2011 and will grow to $2.468 billion by 2016. Research from MarketingSherpa’s 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report shows that the email marketing strategy for most B2B marketers still predominantly revolves around sending mass emails to a marketer’s entire mailing list. The big question is about nurture email leads.

Email marketing is directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing.

The email segmentation and lead nurturing is made possible through marketing automation software and contacts database. Even for those that have the best software in the world, the lead nurturing strategy and process is very complicated. Here are a couple of strategies to better email nurturing processes:

Nurture Your Subscribers

Your subscribers are not always ready for a sales call. They subscribed to get to know your products/services and your business knowledge. Your email strategy should be planned in a way that the subscribers transit from a passive email follower to a buying customer. Once a person has subscribed to your mailing list then you should send him 2-3 educational emails where he gets to know your company more and during this process you should try to learn their specific needs and then focus your message around his needs. This is a time taking exercise, but will be worth it if executed intelligently and with diligence. To learn your prospects needs use tracking software and email marketing software that gives insight into each and every activity that the email newsletter causes them to perform. Establish a digital road-map of their interaction with your content and your sales team will thank you.

Qualified Leads Nurturing

Researchers from MarketingSherpa’s 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report have found that 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to Sales, but only 27% of those are actually qualified or ready to talk to Sales. You should nurture your leads to the point at which sales conversion is most likely.  Nurture your audience to engage them and touch their unique pain points/interests by analyzing their online interactions and digital body language. Once, this lead has been further qualified then bring your Sales team into the conversation.

Sales Lead Generation | Performance-Based Marketing Automation

Social media is made up of a set of different websites, which provide a network of interactions among people allowing for the creation, sharing, and exchanging of information and ideas in virtual communities and networks. Andreas Kaplan a famous professor of Marketing at ESCP Europe Business School defines social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that

Social Media Marketing

build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content.” Furthermore, social media depends on mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms through which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content.

Social media marketing is the process of gaining traffic, or attention through social media sites. This has become a powerful medium with which to broadcast your message to targeted audiences so many businesses have made social media a strategy to their marketing. Common Platforms include:

• Delicious
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Foursquare
• Google+
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Social Search Engine

Each social media site has to offer something different e.g. Twitter is a social site designed to let people share short messages or “updates” with others. Facebook, in contrast is a full-blown social networking site that allows for sharing updates, photos, joining events and a variety of other activities.

Companies can  spread their message to their targeted audience and social media is also now giving those companies huge visibility into the search engines through the newest algorithms like the Panda Algorithm from Google.

Social media marketing professionals create content that attract attention and encourage individuals to share with their social networks. Thus, a compelling message has the potential to go viral and get spread from one user to millions of users in the blink of an eye.

For example, one of the most widespread social networking message was #beatcancer, posted 209,771 times on Twitter by different individuals within 24 hours of its first appearance on 17 October 2009. It was the cancer awareness message of a cancer fund-raising event – which went on to raise over $70,000 over the 24 – hour period.

Sales Lead Generation | Performance-Based Marketing Automation

It is achieved by using a software platform which is designed to automate and streamline marketing repetitive tasks. The organization benefits by specifying criteria and outcomes for tasks and processes which are then interpreted, stored and executed by software. This process increases efficiency and reduces human error.

Marketing Automation is generally referred to email marketing automation, but in a broader sense, marketing automation refers to automation and analytic tools for marketing.

There are three categories of marketing automation software:

1. Marketing intelligence: this gathers data about online prospects’ interest behavior in product or services and is used to track codes in social media, email and webpages. It has records about these prospects: the social media group or thread they followed, the link was clicked on in an email or the search term was used to access a website.

2. Marketing automation: this maintains the marketing funnel until the lead is converted into a sale. Prospects are scored, based on their activities, and then presented drip campaign messaging via email and social channels, thus nurturing them from first interest through to sale.

3. Advanced workflow automation: this is focused on the internal marketing processes (budgeting and planning, workflow and approvals, the marketing calendar, internal collaboration, digital asset creation, management and essentially everything that supports the operational efficiency of the internal marketing function)

Sales Lead Generation | Performance-Based Marketing Automation

Currently, there are many standards and schemas for marking different types of information on your web pages. Hence, it has become difficult for the webmasters to decide on the most relevant and supported markup standards to use. A schema supported by all the major search engines makes it easier for webmasters to add markups, which makes it easier for search engines to create rich search features for users.

The use of proper SCHEMA’s is very important for your website so that search engine crawlers can find the most relevant information such as reviews, stats, address, rates, specific services, events, video etc.

SCHEMA.org is improving itself day by day and it will continue to evolve for the many years in the future. It is expected that the evolution will come from two major sources.

1. Identification of new kinds of structured data that can be used to provide better search results, and
2. As SCHEMA developers further develop and evangelize their SCHEMAs.

As a first step, you should find out if your site is using SCHEMAs you can verify this using Google’s webmaster tools.

Sales Lead Generation | Performance-Based Marketing Automation