So you’ve got Salesforce dialed in, you’re getting the hang of things, and, thanks to your hard work, you’ve got 10,000 leads at your disposal! Awesome! Prospecting is no small feat. So you’ve got your list, you’re excited to close some deals and now….. Well…. Nothing. It seems like you’ve hit a brick wall. Hardly any of your leads are converting and it seems like more and more drifting away each day. We’ve been there before, and it’s frustrating. It makes sense though–it’s just shy of impossible to manage and interact with even 10 leads, much less 10,000. In fact, the average sales professional can only handle 8-10 opportunities at one time. Fortunately, today’s many CRM platforms can integrate quickly with marketing automation tools like our very own 366 Degrees to nurture even the largest of campaigns into customers for life.
To start, one of the best ways to make leads turn to deals is to change your mindset. Nurturing leads is a lot like friendship. Without communication and interaction, your leads will begin to fade, much in the way of a long-distance friendship. If your sales and marketing team isn’t actively pursuing a lead, the chances aren’t high of them suddenly calling you up to buy your product. If you want to make your leads become anything more than just another name in your CRM, it’s up to you to pursue them. Active engagement and interaction keeps your leads interested and in touch. Luckily, we have just the tools to make this simple.
Enter 366 Degrees, our flagship SaaS marketing automation and sales outreach platform. 366 Degrees allows you to easily send out social posts, emails, and landing pages to selectively targeted audiences that you manage through Salesforce (or any CRM of your choosing). Here, you can seamlessly drop in that big beautiful leads list you generated. Next, you move onto the content creation tab, where email and webpage landing editing is made simple. Using pre-designed content, you can drag and drop these template pieces, fill in your own text and images, and add variables to be filled in by your CRM, such as company, location, and contact name. This makes your emails personal, as each lead receives an email tailored perfectly to them. Think about how much nicer it is to get an email addressed to you by name, instead of “Valued Customer,” or “Dear Friend.” Yikes. Just because it’s marketing automation doesn’t mean you have to lose that personal touch. Besides, vague, blanketed emails feel a lot more like the King/ Prince who wants to all the sudden send you a million dollars locked in an escrow account based on your long lost great grandpappy’s estate sale.
Now, what happens next is up to the lead! If they’re interested, they can click a link to read more or sign up for a list. Maybe they’ll just open it and take a quick read through. Even more commonly, they may not even read it. No matter how hard you work on crafting the perfect email and subject line, many people will still NOT read your email. It’s just the nature of email marketing. Fortunately, no matter how much interest (or lack thereof) they show, you can automatically have a predetermined integrated campaign to follow up. For instance, if they didn’t read it, you can schedule a followup to go out the following week. Depending on what they did if they read it, you can tailor multiple different emails for each action. The best part is, 366 handles all the nurture phases of building a relationship for you! No more trying to individually compose emails to each and every lead and following up one by one.
As you run your integrated campaigns, any and all interactions the lead has with your email, landing pages, and content are pushed back into Salesforce automatically. That way, you can track lead engagement in real time. All the info you need is one place! The ability to gauge interest and follow up accordingly automatically without having to manually contact every last lead can be a game-changer for anyone struggling to manage large lead lists. You can also use the information 366 pushed back into Salesforce to check back on lost connections and re-engage old leads.
The reason marketers and salespeople strive for active engagement is to create “customers for life.” If you can effectively turn a lead into a sale, you can turn that sale into a lifetime user of your products. Think about all the times you’ve bought something and never heard from the seller again. Off the grid. Just like that. Now compare that to the time you bought a product and got an email following up the next day. That same company likely sent you a birthday coupon, kept you up to date on new product offerings, interacted with you on social media, and quickly answered any questions you may have. In fact, you probably still use this company’s service to this day, even though cheaper options may exist. This type of engagement across the customer life cycle creates more than just a one-and-done sale. In the past, this has been a lengthy and time consuming process. Now, all it takes is one-step integration between 366 Degrees and your CRM to make leads for life.
Try 366 Degrees for FREE on the Salesforce appexchange! Signup Here