3 Ways Marketing Teams Can Help Shorten the Sales Cycle

Inbound marketers are armed with a serious about of data that can be used to help a sales team close more deals. There are two primary ways to nurture leads down the funnel faster:

1. Segmentation
2. Personalization
3. Lead Nurturing Campaigns

Both tactics give your leads the i-am-a-special-snowflake feeling and help build trust.

1. Segmentation

A marketer who is a master at identifying and segmenting leads is worth their weight in gold to a sales team. When you are able to segment leads based on persona, industry, stage of the funnel, or any other qualifier it helps sales make a more accurate prediction for their forecast. Additionally, segmentation (with the proper data) improves the sales and marketing meeting because you have proof of what the sales team should expect to come into their funnel in the near, and not-so-near future.

2. Personalization

Personalization is of the utmost importance in marketing today. The most common way to personalize marketing assets for your leads is through email. Today, you can personalize the email with any contact information you have in your database. But, what if you could go beyond personalizing emails and actually personalize your website content. Imagine a lead coming to your website who has looked who has downloaded an ebook. Now, imagine a customer coming to your website. Shouldn’t each person see something different? Yes. How do you do this?

While there are new tools being developed daily, one of the first to implement a sleek personalization system into their CMS is HubSpot. They launched Smart Content and marketers fell in love. Now, not only can you tailor downloadable content to leads at different stages in the funnel, you can actually tailor website pages to say different things as well. If you haven’t checked out Smart Content yet, you should.

In addition to Smart Content, HubSpot’s CMS offers Smart Calls-to-action that can be assigned segmented lists, lifecycle stage, or contact properties. This way the compelling content you create is getting shown the right people.

3. Lead Nurturing Campaigns

Also known as drip campaigns, lead nurture campaigns are instrumental in moving your leads closer to buying. However, you need to be methodical in the way you approach this. If you find yourself creating many “general” campaigns, you are defeating the purpose. Lead nurturing campaigns should be specific, personal, and solve a pain point for your persona.

Here are nine tips for creating great lead nurturing campaigns:

1. Understand your sales cycle and the buyer’s journey
2. Decide which persona you are targeting with the campaign
3. Set specific goals for the campaign
4. Map your content
5. Always use email marketing best practices
6. Mix up the types of emails you send out (some marketing-style, some more personal)
7. Test before launching
8. Track and report on your results
9. Do not be afraid to update the campaign or delete it if it is just not working for you.

Remember to view lead nurturing as more than just what your website provides. The first download is an invitation to a conversation about how you can be the solution to the lead’s challenge. It’s up to you to follow through with great nurture campaigns to prove it.

If you follow the three items above, not only will sales be happy with you, but you will also be able to prove marketing ROI for you company. Changes like this are a win for you and all of marketing