Timing is Everything When Connecting to Prospects
Most B2B buyers are already 57% of the way through the buying process before meeting with a sales rep for the first time. People are more curious and search for answers before getting in touch with sales, impatient, and have greater expectations than ever before.
Knowing that 68% of B2B customers prefer to research independently online, you need to prepare yourself with a seamless and effortless experience for your prospects. Their mindset has changed towards a need for instant satisfaction, digital tools, and data-driven solutions.
Ultimately, your website is a “sales machine,” whether your company is using it that way or not. Best practices dictate that B2B websites should be designed to accommodate the sales process.
The Lead-to-Sales process consists of three stages: Lead Identification, Lead Generation, and Qualifying Prospects. Understanding their needs drives the selection of tactics used to reach them with highly relevant messaging appropriately. But, besides all these factors, you must add a “precious” one: timing.
Since people look for answers, knowing when to act becomes one of your biggest challenges. We now face a new dynamic in the marketing mix: merging the “why” messaging with the high relevance of the “when.”
We now use marketing automation tools, like Sugar Market, to provide vital business information to ease our work. A marketing automation platform captures leads data and profiles visitors to improve your follow-up initiatives. It also helps group online resources (i.e., whitepapers and webinars) to engage and educate prospects, and finally, to invite visitors to engage in social media extensions both with the company and with key individual employees.
It all begins with the right tool predicting what, how, and when to communicate your message to advance the prospect through the sales cycle process.
Get Ahead of Time
To start improving your engagement rates and getting the message out to your prospects at the right time, we recommend these tips:
- Test and learn to discover new opportunities by conducting experiments and analyze marketing metrics before making any decisions.
- Share the insights you get. Your sales team will react faster as they have a complete look at their prospects.
- Integrate your marketing automation with your CRM. The bi-directional data sync between the two tools enables you to deliver more relevant messages and generate responses leading to specific landing pages or even moving visitors through the sales process while on the corporate site.
- Use a marketing automation platform, such as Sugar Market, that makes the hard things easier. Market’s predictive scoring models enable marketers to easily see which prospects are more likely to engage with your content.
As a result, you will have a better understanding of the customer experience. This will empower you to build and adjust your internal processes in a timely fashion to maintain consistency throughout the customers’ journey and prevent them from churning.
Closing Thoughts
Today’s marketing teams have access to massive quantities of data which give them important insights about their prospects. But to be successful requires not only visibility into your business, but the ability to act fast.
Knowing your customers’ and prospects’ patterns and their disposition to purchase is not simply a reason to react promptly, but to be there proactively delivering the right message when the timing is right.
If you want to do more for your customers, as they demand instant satisfaction, delivered with digital tools and data-driven solutions, reach out to us!
