4 Communication Techniques to Create Marketing Qualified Leads

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Lead generation begins with understanding your perfect prospect profile. It starts with identifying the demographics and psychographics of those companies that have the best strategic fit with your organization’s products, services, and values. Knowing your perfect prospect profile is the way for marketing to create targeted campaigns to elicit interest in your company’s solutions and for sellers to prioritize their prospecting calls.

As you know, marketing is the functional group that is tasked with promoting their company’s products and services to an identified audience. They cast a digital net via many outlets like email, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and webinars. They also host events at trade shows, engage with analysts at Gartner, Sales Mastery, or Forrester. They speak at industry events where all this activity has one and only one objective: To create Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) so the sales force can engage with these prospects and ultimately close business.

Communications and messaging are the sole medium and channels that marketing uses in all its promotional events, including each of the above-mentioned tactics and a host of other marketing strategies. The core of marketing is communications and messaging—period.

How they position the company and the value of its products and services is key to the financial viability of any company.

With a company’s financial future depending on marketing’s communications and messaging efforts, what can leaders do to ensure the messaging resonates with their perfect prospect so that these prospects ultimately become marketing qualified leads?

  1. Call to Action (CTA). A compelling, direct call to action is the most important part of every single marketing communications. Whether it’s an email, LinkedIn message, trade show event, or webinar, marketers must let prospects know how they can further engage with your company. The CTA should be strong, clear, and concise. It should provoke emotion and/or enthusiasm, and it should include why your prospect should engage with your company.

 

  1. Sales and Marketing Alignment. Sellers are on the front-line. They are conversing with prospects day in and day out. They know exactly what messaging resonates with buyers and what doesn’t. It’s marketing’s role to discern that their messaging, and supporting communications tools, resonates with the prospects that salespeople are talking with.

 

  1. Success Stories. There is nothing better than showing a prospect how one of your customers in their industry has successfully used your solutions and realized tremendous results. It is documented that success stories have the biggest impact on sales effectiveness and is a key contributor to moving a prospect from “suspect” to a marketing qualified lead. It’s important that marketing identifies successful customers, creates case studies, and messages these successes to their perfect prospect profile.

 

  1. Lead Scoring. The only way to know if a prospect is a marketing qualified lead is by measuring each contact against a lead score. This goes back to identifying and knowing your perfect prospect profile. How close is this person to your perfect prospect? In addition to your perfect prospect score, there are other scores to consider like the prospects interest level in your solutions, overall fit with your business, and their BANT score. Do they have budget, authority, need, and timing? Lead scoring requires precise communications between sales leadership, marketing, and the sales teams.

The primary reason for any (for profit) company to be in business is to earn revenues for themselves and/or their shareholders. It is a company’s marketing organization through their communications and messaging that serves as the primary vehicle to engage prospects and ultimately convert them to marketing qualified leads for sellers to pursue and close business.

 

For More Information Contact:

Dave Toole
CEO
The Gig Economy Group
408-482-9854

Artificial Intelligence – Delivering Results Via Enhanced Communications

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As described in our last email, LifeVantage partnered with the Gig Economy Group to develop and deliver an AI-driven mobile communications application that effectively guides each seller step-by-step through a set of communications and selling processes that helps them to achieve increased sales volumes in less time than before.

In this follow up email, we’ll share some of the successes LifeVantage was able to realize as a direct result of implementing the Gig Economy Group’s AI-driven communications application.

LifeVantage uses a direct distributor model to sell their products. An important, strategic KPI in direct selling is “getting new distributors to first dollar in 30 days.” Getting new sellers to first dollar in 30 days significantly reduces the likelihood they will churn. As a direct result of implementing the Gig Economy Group’s app, LifeVantage found a remarkable decease in churn because the application’s communication and recommendation engine guided sellers in getting to first dollar. After implementing the application, first dollar went from 5% of new distributors to 22% in the first 30 days. This is an extraordinary increase of 400% of independent consultants getting to first dollar in 30 days.

As a result of this, LifeVantage is able to enjoy respectful retention rates as a direct correlation to getting new sellers to first dollar. In measuring this KPI, LifeVantage looked to measure those independent distributors who were active and ordering products consistently after six months. They looked to compare those who were using the application versus those who were not. Again, the results were astonishing. 49.2% of sellers who did not use the app were active after six months. Conversely, 63.7% of distributors who used the app were active after six months. This an impressive retention rate of 13%. These two KPIs: Getting to first dollar and increased retention rates have significantly helped LifeVantage in their battle to manage churn and to ultimately improve their bottom line.

The Gig Economy’s group of communications and AI experts would like to invite you to a brief assessment where we will evaluate your rate of adoption for new communications, training, or adopting new practices. We will ask a set of questions and deliver a report that identifies the 3-4 gaps between an ideal business state and where your organization lies. I invite you to reach out to Dave Toole to schedule a 30-minute assessment.

Artificial Intelligence – Changing How We Communicate

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When thinking of Artificial Intelligence (AI), images of space ships and space men come to mind. While AI is likely part of Elon Musk’s company Space Exploration Technologies where they manufacture space transportation services, AI is actually part of today’s every-day business applications.

A case in point. The Gig Economy Group created an AI-enabled application for LifeVantage, a publicly traded, direct selling, company whose sole purpose was to create a communication’s vehicle designed to improve the messaging and interactions between corporate, their distributors, and their new distributors.

The problem LifeVantage faced was that their independent sellers were typically between the ages of 45 and 60 who are looking to supplement their income and most likely didn’t have the communications acumen required in business to effectively present solutions to customers.

Additionally, LifeVantage had some loosely connected apps to support their business and its communications, but they weren’t intelligent—meaning they weren’t learning over time and weren’t optimizing the distributor’s sales performance. Because of this, LifeVantage didn’t have their finger on the pulse of their business.

They looked to the Gig Economy Group to develop an application from the ground up using AI and machine learning that could recommend the optimal communication practices and methodologies for any situation.

By partnering with the Gig Economy Group, LifeVantage was able to provide to their entire distributor network of 70,000 independent consultants in 19 countries, an AI-driven, mobile app solution that effectively guides each seller step-by-step through a set of communications and selling processes that helps them to achieve increased sales volumes in less time than before. The app, through a series of communication prompts successfully onboards new distributors in a consistent manner, provides coaching and mentoring when it is needed, and delivers best practices to their entire distribution network. All of this, and more, was accomplished through the Gig Economy Group’s AI-powered communications application with its recommendation engine—substantially improving LifeVantage’s bottom line.

In our next email, we’ll share with you some of the extraordinary benefits LifeVantage attained by implementing the Gig Economy Group’s AI-driven mobile communications app.

If you are interested in exploring how to bring speed into your sales transformation and seeing how other companies have successfully implemented strategic initiatives, and as a result have increased their bottom line, I invite you to reach out to the contact below to schedule a 30-minute overview.

Sales Enablement’s Top Priorities

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As stated in our last email, communications and messaging are the most critical aspects of any successful sales transformation initiatives. Our experts at the Gig Economy Group are not the only ones to know the significance of this. We reached out to our research partner, Sales Mastery to see what their latest study of over 500 B2B sales professionals said their top sales enablement priorities were.

The following chart from Sales Mastery shows that the number one priority for sales professionals for the remainder of this year and into next is to optimize their value messaging.

 

This is not a surprise because communication and messaging are the cornerstones of any prosperous business. It is how employees and management interact with each other to reach strategic organizational goals.

There are many aspects of communications to look at; however, we’ll focus on two major challenges associated with poor or misaligned communications and messaging.

First are the extraordinary costs. In our last email, we stated the cumulative cost per employee per worker was $26,041 as a direct result of communications barriers. To further illustrate the high cost of communication misalignment, when looking across enterprise B2B companies with approximately 100,000 employees we were astonished to find that $62.4M is lost to the bottom line. 1 This equals $624.00 per employee. A mid-size company with approximately 100 employees will lose about $500K to the bottom line. This equal $5000.00 per employee. All of these numbers are incredibly astonishing!

Second is the missed opportunity when rolling out new strategic sales transformation initiatives. Management has spent an inordinate amount of time and resources to determine which sales transformation projects will put them ahead of the competition or keep their current competitive advantage. Communications and messaging are at the forefront of sales transformation initiatives—whether it’s training the sales force, developing new products and services, or investing in new infrastructure—each aspect of a sales transformation initiative needs an effective communication plan in place where each employee understands their unique role and how to execute upon it.

We look forward to sharing more information with you around communications and messaging.

If you are interested in exploring how to bring speed into your transformation and seeing how other companies have successfully implemented strategic sales transformation initiatives, and as a result have increased their bottom line, I invite you to reach out to me to schedule a 30-minute overview.

 

1 https://redeapp.com/2016/10/27/high-cost-miscommunication/

Communications & Messaging Critical to Sales Transformation

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To remain competitive, organizations must introduce new strategic sales transformation initiatives, whether it’s expanding into emerging markets, acquiring or merging with complementary companies, or introducing new products, these initiatives must be successfully executed for the company to realize the projected revenues tied to the initiative.

Sales transformation investments required to support any new strategic initiative must be identified and prioritized. Whether these investments are increased use of sales intelligence to identify shifts in the marketplace, or delivering AI-enabled sales technologies to deliver precise information, or a concerted effort to expand the organization’s social selling footprint—all these investments will be for naught if communications and messaging are not at the forefront.

Communications and messaging are the most critical aspects of any initiative if it is to be successful. That’s why we are offering a sneak peek into an online briefing we co-created with our strategic partner, Sales Mastery.

Here are a couple of astounding findings from the intense work we have done around communications and messaging:

  • A mere 7% of employees today fully understand their company’s business strategies and what’s expected of them in order to help achieve company goals.
  • $26,041 cumulative cost per worker per year due to productivity losses resulting from communications barriers.

The first finding is especially worrisome when thinking about all that is riding on the organization to successfully implement any new strategic initiative. First and foremost is the competition. Those competitors that get first-to-market advantage could enjoy the benefits of being first to market for a considerable amount of time. Second is lost revenues associated with sales transformation initiatives. This includes all the financial investments the company made.

The second finding simply states that poor and ineffective communications and messaging is very expensive.

Stay tuned! We’ll be sharing our online briefing and analysis around Real-time Communications and Messaging.

If you need support with your digital transformation please contact us. Our last digital transformation was for a public company that benefited with double digital revenue increases.

Approach to Successful Sales Transformation Initiatives

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Introduction

The world of B2B sales has never experienced the rate of change that is occurring today due to COVID-19. Since the pandemic interrupted business as usual earlier in the year, companies immediately sent their work forces home, and for the first time ever, the vast majority of businesses are now operating remotely. We are all aware of this but sales organizations and their supporting functional groups like sales enablement, finance, marketing, etc., began using communication tools like Zoom, email, texts, social media, and other collaboration solutions in an effort to not lose the momentum they had gained since the first of the year. These frequent, yet disjointed efforts to communicate resulted in sales organizations actually taking their eye off the ball and the new sales transformation initiatives that were in place during Q1 that were intended to improve the effectiveness of the sales organization began experiencing poor adoption rates as sellers reverted to their old way of selling.

Four Pillars to Implementing Sales Transformation Initiatives

Studies have shown that the most effective approach to implementing new sales transformation initiatives into the sales organization consists of four pillars.

  • Pillar I – Communication and Messaging
  • Pillar II – Engagement
  • Pillar III – Adoption
  • Pillar IV – Best Practice

Pillar I – Communication and Messaging

To remain competitive, companies need to continually evolve. New sales transformation initiatives are essential to help companies adjust to new market dynamics and opportunities. Effective communication and messaging are critical in implementing new strategic initiatives. When there is alignment in communications, revenue has been shown to increase in double digits. In a more decentralized environment, the question becomes how can we increase communications effectiveness and what is the optimal number of times to communicate and message to an audience to elicit a response. This is known as “effective frequency.” Marketing’s Rule of 7 states that people need to “hear” the message at least 7 times before taking some type of action. However, a frequency beyond 7 has cumulative benefits; the point of diminishing returns doesn’t occur for a good period of time. Microsoft conducted a study where they found the effective frequency to be upwards of 20. While 20 may seem excessive, the first several communications are “heard” as background noise. It’s not until the 9th or 10th time that the recipient becomes aware of the message. And It’s not until a few more interactions that the person engages or responds to the communication. The effective frequency depends on the type and level of engagement. E.g., text, email, LinkedIn, webinar.

Pillar II – Engagement

Engagement is where the sales organization begins to practice and use the new sales transformation initiative in their day-to-day workflows. A good example of this is sales training. Attending sales training programs, whether in person or virtually, is the communication and messaging piece. It usually one and done. Research has shown that only 30% of information demonstrated during training is retained. However, this number increases to 75% when sellers return to the office and practice the new ideas communicated during their training. This number can be further increased when sales managers reinforce training concepts through coaching and mentoring. After a period of time, the benefits and results of the new selling approach becomes apparent to a majority of the sales organization. This is when the company enters the adoption phase. Most teams have not been able to measure these engagement and adoption touchpoints until now.

Pillar III – Adoption

To continue with the sales training analogy, adoption is when the sales organization has embraced the new approach to a new initiative and the likelihood of sellers and sales managers reverting back to their old way of selling becomes slimmer as time goes on and the benefits and results continue to improve.

Pillar IV – Best Practices

The last pillar is the final stage in successfully implementing a new sales transformation initiative(s). This is where the new initiative becomes “how we do business.” Again, to continue with the sales training example, everyone in the sales organization, whether they are a seasoned veteran, a new seller, or an experienced seller that is new to the organization knows that this is the selling approach used and this is what you do to be successful in your role as a salesperson and/or sales manager. Additionally, when sellers model top-tier performers, the entire organization benefits financially.

Implementing Successful Sales Transformation Initiatives

Sales transformation initiatives vary from company to company and depend entirely on the strategic goals the company is committed to attaining over a certain period of time. It may be that several initiatives must be implemented in order to achieve a long-term strategic goal. For example, onboarding new sellers to be effective with a new initiative in days, not months takes a coordinated effort.

When it comes to effectively implementing new sales transformation initiatives, the Gig Economy Group (GEG), founded by Dave Toole, is a sales transformation company that delivers results through their Adaptive Sales as a Service platform. Their expertise in sales transformation is unparalleled on a global basis and GEG’s supporting software ensures strategic initiatives are effectively implemented using the four pillars as a framework.

For more information, contact Dave Toole, CEO of The Gig Economy Group.