How to get more business opportunities in a post-COVID-19 era

Step 1: Talk To Sales & Build Personas

Something we can all agree on: nobody likes to waste time on non-qualitative leads. So how can you make sure that your time is well spent, and that your marketing team is generating the right leads for the sales team?

The first thing to do, is to define a specific target audience where you feel the chances of success are the highest. It is crucial to do this together with your sales (team) as they can give valuable input thanks to their market experience. Once you have defined a target audience, try to build buyer personas, where you identify their challenges & goals. This free persona builder from HubSpot is a great way to construct your buyer personas.

Step 2: Make A Marketing Battle Plan

Once you have defined your buyer personas, run them by your marketing team to check whether you can target them via digital marketing. The insights from your marketing team will shape the battle plan to generate leads within your target audience. If your personas are quite specific - in other words if you have a relatively small target audience, a personal 1-1 sales approach is better than an extensive marketing campaign. With a larger target audience, it is best to start with a well targeted digital marketing campaign to narrow things down, and follow-up on the most interesting leads first.

Step 3: Deliver Value To Your Target Audience

Generating qualitative leads is the result of a well-thought-out campaign. In order to get there, you need to deliver value to the personas that you have created. Once you have outlined their challenges and goals, you know which values and solutions of your company are relevant to your target audience. It is essential to show this value!! Share insights, strengths and pitfalls your target audience should be aware of. If they see you know the struggles they are dealing with, they will soon realize that you are the right partner for them, with a solution to their problems or challenges.

For example, your company is selling B2B cybersecurity solutions and your target audience are small Company Owners. Their biggest concern is that their company secrets would be stolen electronically. In this case, it makes sense to explain to them how they can adequately protect their company, which steps they can take to get there & what the most common pitfalls are when implementing a cybersecurity solution. By doing this, your audience will see you as a valuable company that knows what they are talking about.

In the next phase, you could provide the readers of your content with a free check-up to evaluate their current cybersecurity protection level. This way, you don’t only provide them value, you also pave the way for your sales to contact your prospects' IT Managers and share additional insights based on their specific needs. In this example, you have successfully facilitated the sales conversation by delivering the right value, to the right person, at the right time.

Step 4: Explore 2021-proof Sales Techniques

When your sales are reaching out to leads generated by your value-driven campaign, make sure they are using techniques that make conversations as human and personal as possible. Especially now that many meetings are taking place online and probably still will in the foreseeable future. A human way to reach out to prospects is key to success. An easy way to do this, is to switch from text emails and traditional phone calls to using video. People are 75% more likely to watch a video than to read documents, emails or articles. Solutions to make personal videos such as Vidyard are making things easy for your sales team to use video. Via Vidyard, sales can share presentations, follow-up on proposals, or say hi to new prospects in an easy way using video marketing. See example. 

Research from Deloitte Insights shows that the human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text. The research also shows that by the end of 2020 more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic came from video. Additionally, the clickthrough rate is much higher, resulting in better sales results. Another tool to consider for increasing your sales success ratio is called Crystal Knows. It uses an accurate algorithm to generate personality detection when talking to a potential prospect. Studies have shown that the predictions Crystal generates are accurate up to 80% of the time. 

Combined with your value-driven content strategy, tools like Vidyard & Crystal Knows can help your sales team reach out to new leads in a personal way, increasing the chances of closing deals dramatically.

Step 5: Measure Your ROI

If your personas, strategy & sales outreach are on point, the only step missing is to measure the impact of these great initiatives you have launched. Ideally you can measure how many people are clicking on your content, whether they actually engage with it, and finally how many deals are being made by your sales teams with these leads. 

There are two ways of measuring this:

• The first one is a manual option, by building API links between your website, CRM & invoicing platform. This way you can see how much time & money you invested into generating & advertising content, and how many leads are being generated by it. When also linking your invoicing platform, you can measure the total ROI when the customer is being invoiced for the first time.
• The second way to measure your ROI, is to integrate your sales, marketing and deal generation efforts into one single platform. There are many solutions on the market, with HubSpot.com as one of the most well-known. These inbound marketing platforms help you measure your ROI. They do so by measuring the amount of money invested in spreading your content, the number of visitors that turn into leads and the amount of leads that turn into customers. This way you have a clear insight into the ROI of your campaigns without the hassle of linking different tools together. This is usually also the cheaper option as it takes tons of development work to do all this manually.

Additional questions? Don't hesitate to book a free 15-minute meeting with a leadgen specialist.