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[swedenfordynamics]

Lead Generation, bringing strategy and systems together

When talking about processes and especially lead processes as we will be focusing on in this blog post, they of course never look the same. However, we will in this post focus on the main lead process that is used when talking about the lead process in general terms. Another reason for us to focus on the main lead process in this post is that it many cases has been the starting point for companies when they formed their own custom lead processes.

The processes

When we look at the lead processes from a strategic angel we offend divided it into two processes running parallel, “The Purchase process” and “The Sales process”. The Purchase process is the process that the buyer is going though, containing all the steps from the buyers’ awareness of a need, to the closing purchase. The Sales process is the process that the selling company is going through, not as an individual salesperson or as a sales department, but as a whole company. These processes are used (in general terms as mentioned before) both fore B2B and B2C companies.

The fundamentals of Lead Generations existents

If we start with having a look at the purchase process, we can see that due to the new information society, where people in a very easy way can get access to whatever data they need, customers tend to do much more research by themselves now than before.

Ten years ago people would buy a vacuum cleaner from a door salesman but today no one would do that sins they first would like to go online read about the product and compare it to other products.

This is where Lead Generation comes in, since its no longer about creating the need for the customer, instead it’s all about identifying the customers that have the needs and providing them with the right information. Lead Generation is the strategic and technical name of the area that contains all techniques for identifying customers with needs, providing them with the right information and leading them towards a purchase.

Due to the fact that the buyer’s way of approaching a purchase has changed, a big effect is that the marketing departments responsibilities cover many more steps in the purchase process then it did before and the Sales departments/Salesmen comes into the purchase much later in the process then before. The consequence of this is that the marketing department’s gets more responsibility’s and needs to be more effective, and this is where Lead Generation comes into the picture.

Lead Generation Techniques

When working with lead generation we often talk about 3 techniques:

Lead scoring Lead scoring is assignment of points based on behaviour, demographics, grading etc from several channels.

Lead Nurturing Lead Nurturing is activities performed, either triggered automatically or manually, to move leads through the purchasing process to become more qualified.

Lead Routing Lead Routing the process of routing a lead to sales, marketing or others dependant of scoring. 

The Gap between Strategy and Systems

When working with Lead Generation there are several marketing automation systems such as Adobe campaign, Maketo, SiteCore DMS and of course Microsoft Dynamics Marketing that provides functionality to perform the Lead Generation techniques. Parts of the techniques can even be performed within a dynamic CRM system such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM. However the best practise way of working with lead generation is to combine a Marketing Automation system and a CRM system.

So if we want to use the best practise way of doing lead generation a lead often starts on our web where we identify it wish then sends it to the marketing automation tool.  The Marketing automation tool then starts scoring it, and ones it reaches a certain score it ends up in the CRM system where we at last can close the lead/opportunity as won. So far the strategies and systems are still working together.

If we now instead take a look at the Sales process (which is the process that we as a company work though to get the customer to buy our product) what isn’t clear is what stages in the sales process that should be handled in what system and how we as a company could keep track of were in the sales process a lead/customer is.

Conclusion

After going through the definitions of what actions that should be done at each stage and by how it should be performed we came to the following conclusion:

Lead In the lead stage we still don’t have any name or any contact information on the lead.  This stage is mainly about giving the person on the web the right content to get him or her to fill in some contact information, therefore the main system for this is our website.

Marketing Qualified Lead In the Marketing Qualified stage we start providing the lead with campaign material etc. to increase the customer’s interest. These actions are preformed within a marketing automation tool.

Sales Accepted Lead In the Sales Accepted Lead stage our job is to get the lead to come up into a lead score that is so high that it’s worth involving a salesman with it. Sins this is still performed by the marketing department though marketing material we are still working within the marketing automation tool.

Sales Qualified Lead When starting the Sales Qualified Lead stage the salesman takes over the lead to verify if the lead is an opportunity worth starting to work with or not. When a lead goes into the Sales Qualified Lead stage it gets created as a lead in the CRM system sins it’s now the sales department that should handle the lead and the CRM system is the sales departments system.

Opportunity Management If the salesman in the Sales Qualified Lead stage feel that the lead is an opportunity worth working with and want to verify it he or she converts it to an opportunity. So the Opportunity Management stage starts in the CRM system as a new qualified opportunity. The stage also contains classic CRM opportunity action’s such as scoping the opportunity and getting detailed values (estimated close date, estimated revenue etc.)

Close The close stage is all about closing the deal. It contains checklists of things to do before closing. This stage is also performed within the opportunity entity in the CRM system.

Visualizing the stages

Now that we know what stages that should be performed in what systems we might want to visualize the stages for the user as well. Since this blog is all about the Microsoft Dynamics product stack I’m going to show how doing this from Microsoft Dynamics Marketing as a Marketing automation tool and Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a CRM tool.

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing To visualize the first lead stages in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing we just simply connect the stages that are preformed within the Marketing automation tool, with our lead scoring module as done in the picture below:

To learn more about scoring modules in Microsoft dynamics Marketing view this post

Microsoft Dynamics CRM To visualize the stages within Microsoft Dynamics CRM we can simply set up a business process flow that contains the stages from our lead process as in the picture below:

Over and out

/Ted

[swedenfordynamics]

Creating a Landing page

In my lastpost regarding Microsoft Dynamics Marketing I explained how to set up a ScoringModels and how you track visitor’s movement on your site. (View that posthere).

The next step in this in the lead generation process is to identify the web visitor. The aim is to connect the visitor data collected from the website to a name and contact method like an email or a phone number.

To do this you need to start with creating a landing page within Microsoft Dynamics Marketing that later on can be Iframed into your website.

To create a landing page, go to Marketing Execution -> Lead Management and click “Landing pages”

Then click the plus

Start with giving the landing page a Page name (this Is an internal name) and then add the url to the site which you are aiming to publish it on. It is also required to fill in a start and end date for the landing page.

The last thing that you need to fill in before creating the landing page is what campaign this landing page will be connected to. This is an important choice sins all leads that fill in this landing page will automatically be connected to the campaign defined in this field. You find the Campaign field in the “Behavioral Analysis” section.

Once you have saved your landing page you will get a URL located in the content section. The URL is the address to your landing page and you will need to Iframe in to your website later on.

In the “Form Detail” section you define what fields that should be displayed on the landing page. This is done by marking and unmarking the checkboxes in the display column.  

From a strategic point of view you should try to limit the amount of fields sins users tempt to not fill out the landing page if it contains too many fields. A best practise scenario is to only use Name, Email, Company and maybe a phone number.

If you wish to remove the Audio code Set the CAPTCHA Field to “Never”

If you wish to edit the style of your landing page

You can edit the CSS, under the tab “Layout”

Once you are done with your Landing page you need to Iframe it in on your site. You need to do this strategically so that the user gains something by filling out the form, otherwise users will never fill it for out.

As an example, it could be a requirement to fill it out to be able to download the product list or the product price list.

If you’re using a scenario like this you need to add a URL into the “redirect url” field. The user will then automatically be redirected to a specific page once pressing the submit button.

Over and out

/Ted

[swedenfordynamics]

Contacts and Social media connections in Dynamics Marketing

In Microsoft Dynamics Marketing there are three different types of Contacts. Vendor Contacts, Client Contacts and Marketing Contacts.

Sins Microsoft Dynamics Marketing is built to be used by both company’s managing their marketing by themselves and third party marketing vendors, Microsoft has chosen to divide the contacts.

The definition of the different contacts types are:

Client Contacts Clients are contacts you work for that may be invoiced for products and services.

Vendor Contacts Vendors are contacts that do work for you and that you purchase products and services from.

Marketing Contacts Marketing contacts are the end customer contacts that should be placed in marketing lists and that will receive mailings and other campaign interactions. Marketing contacts in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing could be explained as the same thing as customer contact within Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

For more info about the different contact and company definitions within Microsoft Dynamics Marketing click here

To access the contacts within Microsoft Dynamics Marketing click on the “Marketing Execution” module and then click “Marketing Contacts”, “Vendor Contacts” or “Client Contacts”.

If you want to create a new contact in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing you just need to press the plus button.

When you are creating a new contact define what type of contact it is in the group field. If you save or change a contact to a client contact it is NOT possible to change it back to a Marketing contact.

The aim of Microsoft Dynamics Marketing is however not to manually create contacts. Contacts should be added ether by the integration from Microsoft Dynamics CRM or by leads generated from your website.

Contacts in Social media

LinkedIn has without doubt the world’s biggest database with contacts that contains accurate and updated data. However, LinkedIn does not provide any APIs to fetch contact data to other systems.

In Microsoft Dynamics Marketing you at least have the ability to do easy and fast research on your contacts in social media such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

When you access the contact form, in the top bar you have social media Icons. When pressing one of them you will do a search for the contact within that social media.

Over and out

/Ted