When eProspecting is the Preferred Choice Over eMarketing

When eProspecting is the Preferred Choice Over eMarketing: | Optify by Guest

“The role of the B2B sales person is increasingly challenging in the current economic climate. Less than 25% of the leads captured on your website are ready to speak with a sales rep,” says Jon Miller, VP Marketing at Marketo. Meanwhile, a study by CSO insights found that only 6 out of 10 B2B salespeople make quota each year and almost all companies (95%) raise quotas annually.

So, the difficulty for marketing in generating qualified inbound demand, combined with the pressure on salespeople to meet increasing quotas, presents quite a challenge. In fact, according to Dave Green, Director of Marketing Best Practices at MECLABS, more than 75% of marketers say that generating high-quality leads is their number one business obstacle today. Add in the high cost of salespeople trying to do their own prospecting in that vacuum of “not enough qualified leads”, and we have something of a quandary.
Now, clearly marketing automation tools, drip marketing, lead scoring and other best practices are making incremental differences in the quality of inbound leads as well as the makeup of outbound efforts. But, that said, what can you do for a sales team that is clamoring for immediate outcomes? Shrug your shoulders? Tell them to be patient? For most salespeople, patience is not part of their emotional makeup, let alone do they have the luxury of waiting.
I’m sure most of us would agree that the majority of inbound leads are derived from email marketing, blog posts, relevant content on social media networks and various types of web advertising. And, I believe, we’d agree that those inbound leads are at the very top of the funnel and far from qualified enough to be passed to sales.
But what if we designed our outbound efforts, via email, to genuinely begin a personal dialogue with “suspects” while also converting a good percentage of them to qualified prospects, within the same campaign and within a brief time frame? Of course, despite how well we design an “eProspecting” campaign, some will still end up being nurtured with additional content and touches, but the primary goal of such an eProspecting campaign is to secure immediate conversation, demo and meeting commitments for your salespeople. And then let your salespeople do what they do best!
This approach, this “eProspecting” approach, is most definitely achievable. The question is, how?
The good news is that eProspecting methodology leverages many of the same best practices and processes that we’re all familiar with. Segmentation, meaningful content, personalization and business rules still apply. But there are some very fundamental differences as well, and it’s within these differences that lies the secret of why eProspecting can be so effective for shorter-term results.
The key differences can be expressed in a few bullets:

• A multi-touchpoint thread of logically connected email messages within one campaign
• Each message touchpoint extends the dialogue by leveraging the same content in differing ways, beginning first with thought leadership material and evolving into a call-to-action
• The message structure, frequency and timing of “touchpoints” within the campaign – few external links, plain HTML, faster rhythm of message delivery, and more
• Messages to the prospects are delivered from a named salesperson or persona
• Responses are routed to a specific campaign inbox associated with the named salesperson or persona and actively monitored – replies to prospects are immediate, specific and personalized

(For more on email and autoresponder best practices, download Optify’s Complete Autoresponder eBook for B2B Marketers.)
And this point really is key: most of your contacts NEED to be nurtured. Choosing carefully and wisely who to include in an eProspecting effort is crucial. Also taking into consideration when and where you plug the remainder of this target group back into nurture is important as well.
So what are the specifics of an eProspecting campaign? What are the particulars around a multi-touchpoint thread of logically connected email messages within one campaign, leveraging the same content in differing ways across those messages, employing a very specific message structure, frequency and timing of “touchpoints”, and all delivered from a named salesperson or persona and with immediate, specific and personalized replies to prospects?
Bret Smith is Managing Principal at High-Impact-Prospecting, LLC and is an Audience Recruitment Thought Leader and Sales Prospecting Expert. Across 25+ years’ experience in Global Sales, Marketing, Alliances & BizDev, he’s developed considerable expertise around the harnessing of bleeding-edge best “content prospecting” practices, which leverage the convergence of traditional contact data sources and social media.