Maximizing ROI for Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

Maximizing ROI for Your Inbound Marketing Strategy:by Optify
This guest post was written by Jonathan Catley, Digital Content & Marketing Manager of AG Salesworks.
So, you recently came to the realization that your organization can truly benefit from investing in Marketing Automation Software. You have convinced those that needed convincing, and you have integrated this new software with your CRM, Website, and any other tools you use in your sales process. Time has been spent developing work flows, email campaigns, content has been created that tells your story and the leads are beginning to trickle in. Your conversions have increased tremendously and the visibility gained into these leads has also increased thanks to your new investment. Now, how do you maximize this investment to show the strongest ROI?
Inbound marketing is not a new concept, but it has seen a revival of sorts over the last few years. “Create Content and They Will Come” your marketing department has been screaming for months, and so you have begun implementing your new inbound marketing strategy. Your organization has taken pride in the way you are leading your prospects through the funnel with targeted email campaigns and work flows, developed to help determine when to have sales engage with the prospect. Your prospect has opened five emails, visited certain web pages, and provided their personal information to download that very informative ebook your department spent months developing, so now must be the time to have sales engage, right?
The sales rep looks at the marketing qualified lead you just assigned to them, takes a cursory glance at some of the engagement, and puts in a call, leaves a voice mail followed by an email. When the prospect doesn’t get back to the rep within a few days, in most cases, the activity on the lead is forgotten about and the sales rep moves on with his list of prospects he deems more worthy of his time.
As marketers, we are so focused on collecting names and contact information from potential prospects that we lose sight of the most important piece, which is sales pipeline impact. The money spent to generate these leads loses its value without having a proper qualification process in place that can progress your inbound leads into Sales Qualified Opportunities.
Some stats I ran across recently while attending the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston this past October: 43% of organizations do not follow up on all their inbound leads and approximately 70% of organizations do not follow up properly with their inbound leads; meaning they only put in one call and one email to the prospect before discarding the opportunity. Does any of this sound like your organization?
A qualification process needs to be in place, whether it is done by an internal inside sales team or outsourced, to make the best use of the contact information your marketing department has generated. Most organizations tend to move unqualified leads over to their sales department and expect the sales reps to have the time to properly qualify these opportunities. The reality of the situation is that most sales reps will cherry pick through these opportunities, only focusing on the ones they feel will net the best results. When using this process marketers can expect around a 10-30% conversion into sales qualified leads. So out of the 100 leads you just generated as a marketer, your only looking at 10-30 that may move to a next step in the sales process.
With a proper qualification process in place, whether that is through teleprospecting, lead nurturing, email campaigns, or (the best option) a combination of all three strategies, you can expect to see that 10-30% number increase to approximately 60-80%. Your inside sales team will take the time to qualify your prospects properly, only moving them to sales when the customer is ready. The minimum amount of touches your leads will need before moving them on to sales is approximately eight. Sales reps don’t have the time, or the focus to nurture these prospects properly, which is why you see the results with such a low conversion number.
This year, Sirius Decisions added a new piece to their sales funnel, including telequalification as part of the process. Implementing this process will increase your marketing ROI, stuff your sales pipeline full of qualified opportunities, and keep your sales reps doing what they do best, closing deals.

So now that you have incorporated a great inbound marketing strategy to increase the number of marketing qualified leads being generated, make sure you are taking advantage of these opportunities by properly qualifying your leads before you get your sales team involved and maximize your new investment’s value.