Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

I often get asked, what exactly is sales acceleration and where does it fit in the buying cycle?

The short answer: sales acceleration is a point you reach during the lead nurturing process, where the prospect is almost ready to buy – but not quite. When leads are primed to buy, but need a little extra nudge in making the final decision, a sales acceleration campaign can help close the sale.

In other words, a sales acceleration campaign is a campaign that specifically targets warm leads with appropriate messages. Those messages would not be appropriate for colder leads that need to slowly move through the sales funnel.

How to determine who is ready for a sales acceleration campaign

Obviously, the sales rep can decide when a prospect is ready for a sales acceleration campaign and start sending her personalized messages, either through the marketing automation system, or right in the CRM system.

A more automated – and perhaps more accurate – approach would rely on lead scoring. When a lead’s behavior shows an increased interest and readiness to buy, he can be entered, based on a pre-determined score, into a sales acceleration campaign that sends out appropriate messages.

What type of content should I send out?

The content used for sales acceleration usually includes case studies of similar companies and ROI documents. The idea is to give the prospect information that would help seal the deal and support the efforts of sales, which means that these campaigns should always be coordinated with sales so that content and messaging fit the path that sales feels is useful.

Real-time lead alerts

One of the things I like best about sales acceleration tools is real-time lead alerts. Sales reps gain the ability to personally send trackable email from within SalesForce CRM, and to receive real-time email when emails are acted upon. This gives sales reps the real-time sales intelligence they need to sell more effectively.

Why is automation useful here?

Unlike human management of lead nurturing, which unfortunately is prone to errors, automated tools respond to prospect cues in a timely manner, never speeding up the process too soon, or allowing a warm lead to become cold. Detailed tracking information and lead scoring, coupled with real-time lead alerts, mean that sales reps can always follow up in a timely manner. In addition, automated sales acceleration, just like marketing automation in general, is very helpful for companies with limited marketing personnel and resources.

What NOT to expect from a sales acceleration campaign

It’s important to realize that automated sales acceleration tools do not speed up the prospect decision-making process. They do, however, make sure that when the lead is very close to making a final decision, she will have all the information she needs in a timely manner, and that sales would be aware of her reactions to that information. So while the lead is still in control of the process, you are in a position to respond to her actions efficiently and immediately, making sure that no sale ever falls through the cracks.

Marketing automation takes at least three key ingredients to be successful: process, content and technology. But marketing automation cannot live up to its full potential without skilled marketing and sales people driving the process.

Last week, Software Advice advisory board member Justin Gray named six reasons marketing automation is particularly reliant on the skills of people. How your team uses this technology makes the biggest difference between marketing automation success and failure. I think these points are worth repeating, so I’ve taken the liberty of summarizing his main points below. You may read the full BLOG post at Software Advice.

1. Vision
Software can’t predict what your company goals are, or if your marketing program is staying aligned with those goals. It can’t think of a creative campaign. And it can’t come up with a fantastic new way to go after a hard-to-reach demographic. Before implementing any system, its important users set clear success benchmarks.

2. Targeting
Your audience will engage and respond to targeted and relevant campaigns. Marketing automation software doesn’t know how to target your demographic. Your marketing staff has to identify customer segments and behaviors and instruct the software how best to nurture them. And they’ll have to build personas for job functions, purchase history, website engagement and other factors that are important to reaching your audiences.

3. Content Creation
Marketing automation requires content to be effective. The people who create (and repurpose) content need a strong knowledge of the buyer and the ability to create materials (blogs, email blast text, website content, podcasts, ebooks, videos and webinars) that are relevant.

4. Definition
Marketing and sales must agree on what defines a lead, how those leads are nurtured, and when those leads are passed along. Your marketing automation software can provide the automation, but it can’t provide the guidance – that’s your job.

5. Initiative
Marketing is ever evolving, and your lead-generation efforts should be as well. It takes a team of people to continuously fine-tune your strategy and strive for better results.

6. Results
Generating reports and analyzing results are two different skills. Conclusions drawn from data must be analyzed in the context of your strategy, and new ideas and trends must be drawn from it. It takes people to determine if your marketing program is staying aligned with your goals.

The bottom line is that it’s important to recognize that skilled marketing (and sales) people are the key to marketing automation success.

I wasn’t exactly surprised to read that a growing number of companies are recognizing the importance of sales enablement. If sales reps are reporting that “inability to communicate value messages” was their number one inhibitor to achieving quota, and that they have “a knowledge gap” or their company has “too many products to know,” then clearly we’re looking at a situation where Marketing can provide better support to Sales than it does now.

After all, marketing has the knowledge – not just deep knowledge of the company’s products or services, but also – when using a marketing automation system – deep knowledge of the company’s prospects.

This knowledge about each prospect, where they are in the sales cycle, what they did so far on the Web site, how they have responded to emails up until now- this rich history must be communicated to Sales in order for sales reps to be able to have meaningful communication with prospects.

An interesting alternative to communicating marketing knowledge to sales is to directly equip sales with this knowledge, via a sales acceleration system such as eTrigue SalesPro.

A sales acceleration tool assists sales reps in their sales lead management efforts and gives them the power to be more prepared and proactive, making sure each engagement is relevant and timely.

When sales reps have real-time intelligence about prospects, they are empowered to sell more effectively. Tools such as unlimited trackable email, web site activity tracking, email alerts and live tracking give sales reps the information they need to focus on the right prospects, at the right time.

Of course, even with a sales enablement system in place, sales should never be on their own. When communicating with sales reps, B2B buyers already have so much knowledge about the product, that a conversation centered around features is simply useless, and frankly, so is conversation centered around general benefits. The sales rep must be able to communicate compelling value to the specific prospect.

Which means that marketing/sales alignment is still crucial, and marketing (or better yet, the entire organization) must find a way to support sales reps by providing them with key information about the company’s products, so that reps are able to communicate value to prospects and sell more effectively.

I have read Michael Gerard’s recent blog post on IDC’s 2010 Sales Barometer Study with great interest.

I can’t say that I was surprised – I think most of us have seen it coming for a while now. More leads are needed to close a deal now than ever before, buying cycles are getting longer, and sales reps are not as prepared for customer interactions as they should be.

These are familiar pain points, and it’s up to each organization to decide how to solve these issues. Certainly, sales and marketing alignment is a key to solving them. Sales reps should be able to leverage internal resources such as marketing assets to better communicate with customers; sales and marketing should be in agreement on what constitutes a sales-ready lead.

Marketing Automation and Sales Acceleration tools should be used by organizations to achieve better alignment of Marketing and Sales, to foster an atmosphere of a joint effort, and to empower sales reps by giving them better access to company assets and by giving them access to as much data as possible about a lead before they contact that lead. The better informed and well prepared a sales rep is, the better the prospect would react to her (remember customers’ complaint that they are tired of generic sales pitches?)

If we agree that increased Sales productivity drives revenue growth, and I feel certain that we all agree on that, then as our economy slowly recovers from the recession, organizations’ first priority is to improve the productivity of their sales organizations. One of the simplest ways to do that is marketing automation, and easier yet if your budget is tight – start with an affordable, stand alone sales enablement tool such as eTrigue SalesPro.

These tools improve sales efficiency and productivity by giving sales reps crucial real-time sales intelligence, eliminating the need for wasting time and energy on cold calls and on cold leads, enabling sales reps to know which prospect is ready to buy and making sure every sales rep/lead interaction is relevant and timely.

The IDC Sales Enablement presentation from last year is still very relevant today, and is one of my favorite tools for demonstrating why sales enablement tools are so important in the B2B space.

When asked about their relationship with sales reps, buyers said that the most important area where sales reps need to know more in order to improve the relationship between buyer and vendor is the buyer’s needs and objectives:

Adding that sales reps need to “put aside the generic pitch”:

Think about it for a moment, even in terms of your own interactions as a buyer in your own life. When someone is trying to sell you something, is there anything more annoying than the seller starting off with some generic pitch that obviously has nothing to do with you and with your own needs? There’s no bigger turnoff for a buyer than to get the feeling that someone is trying to sell them something without explaining why it is relevant to them, and this is true in any sales situation.

Of course, to be able to put side the generic pitch and sell a product based on the benefits it offers a specific customer, the sales rep must be familiar with that customer and have an insight into what they really need. Sales effectiveness can’t be achieved without the sales force having access to relevant, timely information about prospects and their needs. Generic pitches and cold calls are a huge waste of time and greatly reduce the sales organization’s effectiveness.

Arming your sales force with the insight needed to make a timely connection with a prospect and to offer them relevant information that answers their specific needs rather than using a generic pitch is not an easy task. Implementing a marketing automation system, or a more compact and affordable sales enablement solution, is in fact the only way to achieve buyer-seller alignment, using tools such as trackable emails, prospect activity tracking, and real-time lead alerts. The goal: get to know your prospects better and approach them when they are ready, with a sales pitch tailored to their needs, putting aside that annoying generic pitch.

We have to agree with Laura Ramos of Forrester: sales enablement tools became all the rage in 2009. The recession, which forced marketing organizations to attempt to become efficient and accountable, highlighted the importance of monitoring pipeline health and of efficient, targeted lead generation processes. What’s more, it has become obvious that marketing and sales need to work together if lead generation is ever going to become a truly efficient process.

Why do other Sales Enablement tools force you to buy the kitchen sink?

Not all sales enablement tools are created equal, of course. Most tools on the market are add-ons to existing marketing automation suites. This means that companies are forced to invest in an expensive, full marketing automation solution before they can add on the sales enablement tool.

But what if you don’t have the budget to fully automate your marketing? These systems are expensive, and with the economy still in recovery, many businesses that desperately need to automate their lead scoring, monitoring and nurturing simply cannot afford to spend so much.

SalesPro: an affordable stand-alone Sales Enablement tool

eTrigue SalesPro was created to address this need for highly targeted yet affordable sales automation. This sales enablement application is unique because it is a stand-alone tool that does not force you to spend on a full marketing automation system. Yet, despite its affordability, it presents sales teams with a very detailed view of potential leads.

In addition to eTrigue SalesPro , eTrigue also offers a marketing automation platform – eTrigue Professional. eTrigue Professional and eTrigue SalesPro can either work solo, or combined. Unlike our competitors, you don’t have to deploy a full-blown Marketing Automation platform to use the sales enablement application. But when you are ready, both eTrigue SalesPro and eTrigue Professional work together seamlessly within minutes.

Encouraging marketing and sales alignment

Unlike other Sales Enablement tools on the market, eTrigue SalesPro doesn’t just capture Web site visitors, then email their info to Sales. SalesPro can score and qualify leads, then send out email alerts to sales reps when a lead meets a minimum threshold that was previously determined by marketing and sales.

Which brings us to another reason companies love eTrigue SalesPro: it enables and encourages (maybe even forces!) alignment between marketing and sales efforts, an important key to true marketing efficiency.

Enabling Sales to make informed decisions

We said it before: the last thing sales reps need is to waste their time calling cold prospects. That’s why eTrigue SalesPro does so much more than send short email alerts whenever a lead visits the site.

eTrigue SalesPro automatically creates lead routing rules to provide real-time lead alerts based on identified prospects and their activities. It can also be set to send alerts based on prospect scoring and on specific campaign activity, so that sales reps receive alerts when a lead has met certain scores. The alerts are chock full of useful information: they present the scores and the reasons behind them, along with account and buyer activity. All this information is presented in an easy-to-read format, enabling the sales rep to make an informed decision.

If the sales rep chooses to pursue the lead, she can continue communicating with the lead from within Salesforce.com, using email templates that were prepared and approved by Marketing (did we say alignment?) and that nurture and track the activity.

eTrigue SalesPro is a compact, affordable package, perfect for firms that while not yet ready for full marketing automation solutions, are looking to encourage alignment between marketing and sales efforts, and to improve their pipeline health and their lead nurturing process. It also works beautifully for companies who are already running eTrigue Professional marketing automation solution, but want to implement eTrigue SalesPro to empower their sales team to customize, personalize, and take control of separate initiatives while ensuring that marketing has control of the message.