Don't Pass The Lead To Sales...Yet

A common mistake that I often find with handling leads are when they are handed off to a salesperson without going through anyone in the marketing department. What happens when the salesperson realizes they aren't qualified yet? Or the prospect is a long ways away from buying? Or they aren't yet sure of their need for software.

They eventually get thrown out. And I can't really blame the salespeople. There are only so many hours in the day and they have to dedicate those hours to the leads that are closest to buying - the most qualified ones.

Instead of being thrown out, they should be nurtured...and its the marketing department's responsibility to do this. Whether it is white papers, case studies, success stories, webinars, or some other marketing piece, there is a lot that the marketing department can do to stay in touch with those leads.

Does your marketing department run email marketing campaigns to handle this? Are you hiring top-notch marketing people and holding them accountable for generating, tracking and nurturing leads? Better late than never...

Forrester Event in Scottsdale

I am on the road at a Forrester event in Scottsdale, AZ so this will hav to be brief. (On a sidenote, the Phoenician resort rocks. Some of the best service I've ever experienced). The focus of the event has been promoting IT to be a true peer to the other business executives, right in line with one of Capterra's messages to its users of promoting IT as a better business partner.

My surpise takeaway from the event has been that Forrester dabbles in B2B marketing best practices and has recently written some pieces (Laura Ramos is the key analyst) on the subject. In fact, they even have a marketing blog. It is nice to know that Forrester is recognizing much of what Capterra deals with (and I blog about), particularly in regard to the lack of solid measurement of marketing programs.

It's almost as if marketers (in general) have been so used to not measuring results with traditional media such as print and TV that these have carried over to their online efforts. Good to know that Forrester is joining the cause to help bring marketers up to speed.

7 Software Website Design Pitfalls / Tips

I was recently on the phone with a vendor who didn't respect the importance of website design and the impact it has on sales. Not being a "web design" guy myself, I can understand this mentality. I'd probably be in the same boat if it wasn't for my work experiences over the last couple years. So let me take a moment to stress how crucial your website design is in regard to your ability to convert web visitors into leads.

First, think from the perspective of your target visitor - someone researching their software options who lands at your website. In fact, I highly recommend conducting user studies to see whether your website visitors are doing what you want them to do. Read Steve Krug's book, Don't Make Me Think. It will be a couple hours well spent.

Second, clearly articulate your goal for each visitor. The primary goal will be the same for most software vendors - to convert that visitor to a lead, or more accurately, to convince that person to contact you, or have them provide you with their contact details. A secondary goal is usually to make it easier for salespeople to get collateral in the hands of prospects.

Finally, understand that you have only a couple seconds to entice a visitor to stay at your website and look around.

Here are my top 7 design tips:

1) Design a visually appealing and professional looking website. Good use of colors, good grammar, lots of freely available content, pictures of people - all these are good things.

2) Highlight a free offer on every single page. (Emphasis on "highlight.") Then connect this free offer to a very short form where the visitor needs to enter just a few fields (name, email, phone) to receive the free offer.

3) Include screenshots, testimonials, success stories, case studies, and any other supporting documentation and do so in an intuitive, easy-to-navigate fashion.

4) Have a Contact Us link prominently displayed in the upper right hand corner as well as foot er of every page.

5) List your contact details on your Contact Us page only. (Makes it easier to track visitor success in your web analytic tools.)

6) Include content geared toward teaching the prospect about the benefits of the kind of software you offer in case they are still determining if they want to even make a software purchase.

7) List all of the different market segments (typically broken down by industry and company size) that you target and allow the visitor to click on their segment, which would allow them to view benefits specifically for them.

OK, so some of these are less design tips and more content tips. Actually, the best advice I can give is to constantly test your site, fix it and test again. Website design is an interative process and the goal is to constantly improve your conversion rates. And it's incredible how much of an impact the little things - buttons, graphics, text, position - can have on your desired results.

Top 5 Calls To Action

This could also be entitled Top 5 Free Give-Aways. It is directly in reference to a previous post on the importance of highlighting calls to action on your website. One of the key challenges is striking a balance between what to offer as open content on your site and what you think is "good enough" to entice a visitor to provide their contact details (and thereby convert to a lead).

As Brian Carroll mentioned in a recent post, offering a lot of good open content on your site will provide a huge boost to your online lead generation efforts. But at some point you need to actually convert the visitor to a lead. Here are 5 most common free offers for software prospects:

1. Trial - This is generally considered the homerun. Most buyers will love this since they can immediately start using/testing something to see if it meets their needs. The downside is that many software companies find that their product is just too complex to offer a free trial.

2. Demo - A big step down from an actual trial, but at least the prospect can get a feel for how something would work. However, if you have a slick automated online demo, it may be tempting to have this as open content on your site.

3. White Paper - The white paper would take a specific issue (often technical but not necessarily) that the prospect deals with and explains how technology can be applied to that issue. It will often conclude with why your technology is ideal.

4. Case Study - Describe how a current customer of yours is successfully using your technology to solve their problems and enumerate all of the benefits they are receiving. Also tempting to provide as open content.

5. Consultation - Yes, offer a free consultation with a salesperson. Just be sure that your salesperson can play the role of the consultant. That means, have them ask lots of questions and focus on the needs of the prospect, less on actually selling. (This actually works.)

There you have it. Start offering something for free!