Danielle Carson

4 Strategic Insights to Glean from Conducting a Content Audit

Posted on by Danielle Carson

We know that conducting content audits can sometimes be time-intensive and tedious. We also know that they are almost always worth the effort. Why? Well, because running audits on your content can provide your organization with strategic insights that help steer the direction of your current and upcoming campaigns. Here are the key benefits of a content audit.

What is a Content Audit 

A content audit is a comprehensive analysis of all of your content collectively. “Content” in this context includes your website content such as offers, blogs, and infographics, as well as offline sales and marketing materials, like sell sheets and brochures. 

What’s Included in a Content Audit

During an audit, you will pull all relevant stats and information about each piece. Relevance is in the eye of the bolder it turns out. Consider why you’re completing an audit in the first place and let that dictate what information you need. The purpose of your audit will be different depending on where you are in your content marketing strategy. 

Must-haves to include in your audit per each piece of content:

  • Title 
  • Quick topic summary
  • URL 
  • Stage of the buyer’s journey (awareness, consideration, decision, etc.)
  • Stage of the funnel (lead, MQL, SQL, etc.)
  • Type of content (blog, infographic, etc.)
  • Where the content is accessible/what pages it’s found on
  • Persona targeted
content audit example

Nice-to-haves in your audit:

  • Relevance to current persona/business strategy 
  • SERP relevance and position
  • Total ranking keywords
  • Monthly or quarterly views
  • Conversion rate 
  • Industry targeted

Some of the ‘nice-to-haves’ listed above might actually be critical for your audit. For example, if you’re conducting an audit because you’ve decided to lean into a secondary industry, you will want to include a column to capture it.

Benefits of a Content Audit

You can use a content audit in a variety of different ways depending on your organization’s goals and your current state of marketing. At Lake One, we use content audits to assess the current state of content for our new and existing clients. During onboarding, the content audit provides insights into where our new partners have focused their time previously. We can learn valuable information from this, as well as prevent reinventing the wheel by recreating existing content. Here are some of the most significant benefits and strategic insights of conducting a content audit.

Identify Gaps in Content with a Content Audit

First, a content audit can identify where your gaps in content lay. As part of the inbound methodology, buyers move through the journey to buying from awareness to consideration to decision. As buyers move along that journey, they seek information that gets more complex and product-specific as they go. Getting into the weeds a little, writing content for each stage pushes users into a purchase. For instance, somebody might start looking for a way to improve their manufacturing process (awareness). This might lead them into a specific piece of technology that could solve their problem (consideration), and that might bring them to contacting that particular company for a quote on that new technology (decision).

buyer's journey
Source: HubSpot

As inbound marketers, we want to be sure we’re serving content for every stage here. A content audit allows you to map where your content currently sits and where your gaps exist. Being too heavy on one end of the spectrum or another may be doing you a disservice. 

Facilitate Strategy Creation

As I mentioned, we’re big fans of content audits here. Our Lake One FieldGuides™ (campaign strategies) almost always begin with a content audit. We start here because once gaps and areas of excess are illuminated, a strategy will start to appear. It will be clear where your opportunities exist, both in quick wins and in a long-term strategy.  

Pro Tip: If you find you’ve written ad nauseam towards a specific persona or topic without the desired results, consider adding conversion rates, views, and SERP info into your audit. Compare that cluster of content to others to see if you can identify any misalignments to pivot on in the future.

Make Workflow Creation Easier

Workflows, or drip campaigns as some people call them, are a series of automated emails. These emails intend to serve your lead with helpful content, insights, and CTAs that nudge them into the next step of the funnel. A content audit acts as a visual representation of your available content to lay out the subject matter of each email. What’s usable? What subjects flow together to achieve the desired outcome? If you don’t have a library of suitable topics at the ready, your audit will also identify that for you, so you know what to include in your strategy during your next campaign.  

Content Audit- the Sales Enablement Kickstarter

Lastly, having an up to date content audit available for your team to reference is the perfect first step into sales enablement. Sales enablement, according to HubSpot, is the “iterative process of providing your business’s sales team with the resources they need to close more deals.”

Related Reading: A Roadmap to a Sure-fire B2B Sales Enablement Strategy

If you give your sales team a living document of all marketing materials available, the hope is that they will use that content within their sales process. When sales and marketing teams are aligned, sales will give recommendations into the types of content they’d like created based on their conversations with real customers and prospects. Input from sales teams looks like: 

sale enablement
Source: HighSpot
  • Typical questions their prospects have that could be addressed by marketing material
  • Ideas for resources like eBooks, infographics or sell-sheets that may help close deals
  • Which complex topics marketing can help simplify through content or design
  • Passing along feedback on content from real conversations with prospects and customers

The content audit shows the sales teams what’s currently available for their use, and it also helps them identify what’s not. In the same manner that audits show marketers what’s missing from a high-level funnel perspective, sales teams can use it to determine the opportunities on a topical standpoint. The ultimate goal is to build out a content library that addresses all the needs of both teams.

how to achieve sales and marketing alignment

The Surprising Ways B2B Website Design Affects Sales

Posted on by Danielle Carson

Your B2B website is incredibly important. It’s where people go to learn about your business and what you have to offer. It’s where people go to connect with you and ultimately the place where people decide if your company is one worth exploring further. So what makes a good website? Here are 4 B2B website examples that showcase the best practices of how website design affect B2B sales.

B2B Website Design

The Complexity of the B2B Buying Journey

First, to understand a website design’s impact on B2B sales, you need to understand the B2B buying journey. The journey of a B2B buyer is far more complex than that of B2C. While marketing in both verticles tends to focus on solving a pain point, B2B buyers often narrow in on one core problem and they are looking for a specific solution. Typically, they are looking for a way to accomplish something better, faster, and more efficiently. That might include new tech that automates existing processes, more reliable supply chain partners, software to update an antiquated process. The list goes on, but by and large, business buyers are looking for fixes. 

Master your B2B website strategy. Grab the guide here.

Furthermore, very little B2B purchasing is done on a whim or impulse, and that becomes increasingly true as the sticker price increases. For that reason, purchases, and the journey to purchase, are often drawn out. There are more people involved in the buying process than consumer purchases, and often approvals and buy-ins are needed at many levels. There are existing, internal processes to consider as well. What might seem like a small investment can impact an entire organization. For example, new software can drastically change the day-to-day operations of whole teams, a new supplier might require new equipment and big expenses in training. 

Because of that, B2B buyers are also looking for information. They need to be informed, empowered, and confident before taking options to their teams. Upfront and easy accessibility to information is critical. 

Lastly, businesses are looking for products they can trust- ones with positive reviews given by other trustworthy companies. As mentioned, there can be a lot at stake for B2B buying, and reviews and testimonials can go a long way in mitigating some potential perceived risk for buyers.

B2B Website Design Needs to Be for Conversion

So how do you translate that complex buying journey into a website? Understand that given all of these variables, “Buy Now” likely isn’t going to work up front. The goal is ultimately a purchase for B2B, but B2B products and services are usually something you don’t buy upon the first visit to a site, or even third or fourth visit for that matter. That’s why B2B website designs all need to be designed for conversion and nurturing at every point in the buyer’s journey.

Examples of Great B2B Website Design for Tech

Here’s what we mean. These four B2B tech websites are examples of websites effectively designed for B2B sales.

Slack

Who doesn’t use Slack these days? We love the app, but we also love their website. First, without needing to scroll or open any links, you can immediately tell what the product is and what it does. We call this the “Blink Test.”  Within a few seconds, the main header, images, animations, etc. tell me the basics of what the product is and begin to illude to why I need this product. There are also two prominent and actionable CTAs within the hero space, Free Trial and Contact Sales. Neither of these CTAs are pushing the user into buying immediately, which goes in line with that typically longer B2B selling cycle we talked about earlier. 

slack b2b website design

Additionally, as you scroll down the homepage, you see a section with reviews and the logos of respectable companies who use the app. This builds authority and trust with the audience while also creating a subtle bandwagon effect. 

Lastly, toward the bottom of the page, there are links to Slack’s resource center where you can download helpful eBooks, read blogs, and watch webinars with product tips and helpful information. These eBooks offer conversion opportunities for Slack to nurture their prospects that aren’t ready to commit yet. While most are bottom of the funnel (specific to the Slack app), others are awareness and consideration content. That means these pieces are intended to inform and aide a user along their journey, not push them into buying. (This is all part of the inbound methodology. Click here to learn more about Inbound and why it works.)

Asana 

Asana is the project management tool we here at Lake One use. We’d be lost without it. Their B2b website design is clean, minimal, and has little bits of fun design and personality. They pass our “blink test” with flying colors by providing very clear, precise headlines explaining what the product is and why it’s the best choice for a project management tool.

asana b2b webite design

Asana leads with Try for Free CTAs. Again, these are not directing people straight into buying or having to speak with somebody just yet. The beauty of CTAs like this is the opportunity to nurture a lead. You can set up workflows to send automated marketing to the lead shortly after signup or during the trial window that softly nudges them into the next step toward a purchase. When done right, this can be an extremely effective tool for conversion.

Related Reading: Essential Marketing Automation Functions to Put Your Lead Management on Autopilot

Asana then builds its authority via logos of partner companies and moves into a video on just how easy it is to use. After more credential building via reviews and more product highlights, another CTA is offered. A CTA at the bottom of the page is a standard best practice.

Unbounce 

Unbounce is a tool that allows you to create high-quality landing pages optimized for better conversion. It’s no surprise their website makes our list of best in class. Immediately, the headlines tell you exactly what the product is and how it helps. Notice a theme between this site and the others yet? That “blink test” is critical for holding attention and interest. Unbounce users are likely coming to them for one thing: increased conversions. That’s why their rotating headlines are so perfect- they recognize their user pain points and quickly position themselves as the best choice to fix it. The headlines are simple, solution-focused to a very specific problem most website visitors have, and user-centric. The subheadline then clinches the deal by explaining how in a precise manner. Additionally, the graphics that rotate with the headlines subtly provide the hard data many B2B users need to provide in order to get buy-in and approval on an expenditure.

unbounce b2b website design

Again we see the Free Trial CTA coming in clutch. Selecting software is a highly personalized choice, especially for a product with a high barrier to exit like Unbounce. There are so many variables, unique business elements, and specific business goals that need to be taken into consideration before making a software purchase. Without getting hands-on, it’s hard to know if a product will deliver on those needs. Additionally, while a website can spout off about their product’s ease of use all day, you won’t actually know how easy it is for you to use until you’re in it.

Related Reading: Turn Your Website Into a Lead Machine with HubSpot Lead Flows

Unbounce also uses video to help simplify the complexities of the product quickly. These are appealing, attention-grabbing, and effective. Lastly, they include their logo parade and testimonials to build credibility.

Vidyard 

Lastly, let’s talk about Vidyard. “Vidyard is the easiest way to create, host, and share videos so you can keep connecting with customers and colleagues when everything else feels remote.” That subheadline is so clear I can copy and paste it in here and tell you exactly what they do. The main headline is also user-centric and provides a quick answer to the question all users will have, “what’s in it for me?”

vidyard b2b website design

Vidyard then has a Get Started CTA. This one is a bit different because they offer a freemium subscription method. That means you can use it for free with limited access. In order to get full product utilization, you need to pay.

Master your B2B website strategy. Grab the guide here.

Another thing Vidyard does well is delineating their persona and industry paths. This can be an incredibly effective B2B website design element. Three separate CTAs lead to different content and offerings depending on if you’re in sales, communications, or marketing. This shows a great deal of understanding on Vidyard’s part about their personas. They know that each has unique needs and problems. By speaking to them directly, they can better serve the user with the most relevant, helpful information.

Insider Tips on Building a Marketing Tech Stack You’ll Actually Use

Posted on by Danielle Carson

Nearly every single job you could think of utilizes tools. Whether physical instruments, software, or learned skills, tools are what we use to accomplish our jobs fast, easier, and better. For marketing and sales professionals, we call those tools your marketing tech stack. 

building a marketing tech stack

What is a Marketing Tech Stack

A marketing technology stack, or martech stack, is the collection of marketing tools you use to accomplish marketing activities. These tools empower the scalable growth of sales and marketing functions and are often cloud or SAAS (software as a service) based. Typically these tools help automate manual tasks, simplify complex business processes, and/or carry out marketing tactics.

Is marketing technology right for your organization? Take the free online assessment here.

How to Choose the Right Marketing Tech Stack

marketing tech stack

As of 2019, there are over 7,000 martech platforms available to choose from. With that many options, you could literally subscribe to and cancel thousands of tools before finding the right ones for your organization. So how do you pick the right marketing tech stack? Well, our framework follows the marketing and sales workflow: planning, attracting leads, converting awareness into opportunity, nurturing opportunity to customers and repeat customers, and finally reporting and automating. The more categories you can stitch together under one umbrella, the less you end up with a dreaded Frankenstack. Here’s what to look for in each category.

Tools for Marketing Planning

Planning how to tackle your tasks often consumes significant resources and time. Who is doing what? What day does it need to be done? The project management side of work can get incredibly complex, especially if you don’t have a system in place to hold people accountable and provide transparency. To bust out marketing calendars and the like, some people look to Excel or even handwritten schedules. Technology has a much better way though. Look for tools that provide the framework and ability to automate or add efficiency to planning processes. Simple things like ways to curate content to review it in one place or connecting an editorial calendar to publishing schedules can increase efficiency and reduce last-minute deadline crunches.

When building your marketing tech to help with planning, ask:

  • Do I need integrations with other tools?
  • How do I want to view my plans – in a list? Calendar? Something else?
  • How easy can I remove or add people to the tool, to individual projects, or to individual tasks? How granular do I need to get? 

Tools for Attraction and Conversion

marktech stack

The highest level goal of any marketing initiative is to grow awareness and drive demand. Awareness is typically built through three means – paid, owned, and earned/shared media. You want tools that allow you to carry out a strategy that brings potential leads within each of those buckets. They may be a tool to publish content (a CMS), something that helps you find earned media opportunities, a social publishing tool, etc. 

Once you’ve brought the leads in, how will you convert them? Your tech should help fulfill whatever success looks like to your company-  a form filled out, a cart checkout, an app download, a click to call, a donation, etc.. Your goals here will largely dictate the tools you pick. 

Consider asking these questions:

  • What are the functions of my website? My current CMS? Have I used them to their full capabilities yet or do I need additional tools?
  • Again, consider integrations. If you need data from a form to be added to your CRM, ensure you can integrate to avoid manual work. 
  • What are the gaps in the current processes? Where am I spending the most time?
  • How are we tracking, monitoring, and improving marketing efforts? Do the tools I’m looking at implementing provide the insights I need?

Related Readings:

Tools for Nurturing and Selling

marketing technology

Depending on how your organization is structured, nurturing may live with marketing or sales. Tech for lead nurturing looks like tools where you can create workflows or drip campaigns, sales sequences, and advanced targeting. You want the marketing technology that helps drive new and repeat sales.

Once that sale is in, your martech stack should also aid in moving contacts from the marketing process to the sales process, for tracking and reporting. Whether you use a funnel, a flywheel or any other term – it’s more important that there is a handoff and metric that can clearly feed your reporting. Otherwise, when it comes time to close the loop on how marketing is contributing or how is the revenue team collaborating, you’ll be out of luck.

Sales tools can also have a lot of bloat. We’re looking at you, CRM.

It’s important that you have strong sales and marketing alignment so you are capturing the most important information all through the customer lifecycle – and nothing more – and not 9 versions of the same thing. Again, your reporting will thank you. 

Before getting starting, ask:

  • What tools will help with my sales and marketing alignment? 
  • How do my teams currently work together? How do I envision using martech to improve that?
  • What type of transparency do I want in the sales pipelines? 

Tools for Analytics and Automation

marketing tech stack

Finally, analytics and automation. This category may seem like a bit of a catch-all but it’s the glue that connects everything. The technologies here serve one of three purposes. First, to deliver insights about any of our various marketing touchpoints or databases via a set of analytics. Second, provide optimization via testing, personalization, or data visualization. Third, and finally, leverage automation apps and tools to create a connection between other pillars above, tools, or data sets. 

Related Reading: Sales & Marketing Automation: What it is & what it can do for B2B

Try as you might, you will almost always inevitably end up with data coming from a few sources. You can either put together manual reports, be lucky enough to have an in-house data team, or pull in a data dashboarding tool like Databox. 

A few things to consider: 

  • Are there any of the tools in any of the categories above that may have automation capabilities themselves (or serve across multiple categories- i.e. tools like Hubspot).
  • What data is important for my organization?
  • Do I need a dashboarding tool to streamline data sources?’
  • Who will actually analyze the data and how will it be used? 

Benefits of Martech 

When you implement a marketing technology stack, you’re building the framework for everything mentioned above. The tools you decide to use are the bones of your strategy. In many ways, they enable your team to take your marketing to the next level. This includes:

  • Marketing automation and reduction of manual work
  • Increased lead generation and the ability to nurture leads
  • More impactful analytics, insights, and reports
  • Better aligned sales and marketing teams
  • Streamlined processes and the simplification of complex operations
  • Ability to generate and carry out a comprehensive strategy

MarTech Assessment

Key Takeaways for Building a Marketing Tech Stack

Again, we want to reiterate that there are many marketing tech tools that provide solutions across these categories. Find them. Use them. Integrate them. Layout your goals, ask the important questions and map out your strategy before you subscribe to every Freemium platform available. By doing so, you’ll create an environment for efficiency, more impactful insights, and better alignment. Plus, we bet you’ll actually end up using all those tools.

A Roadmap to a Sure-fire B2B Sales Enablement Strategy

Posted on by Danielle Carson

Implementing a B2B sales enablement strategy can align your internal teams and empower your sales personnel with the tools they need to close more deals. A solid, collaborative strategy can create more effective sales teams and stronger marketing programs. Here are the elements every leader needs to consider when developing their sales enablement strategy.

Creating a B2B Sales Enablement Strategy

What is Sales Enablement?

First, what is sales enablement? According to HubSpot, “Sales enablement is the iterative process of providing your business’s sales team with the resources they need to close more deals.” It involves the creation, distribution, and use of marketing collateral and content within the sales process. The goal of B2B sales enablement is to collaboratively create and use marketing material that sales can use to nurture and close their deals.

Why is Sales Enablement Important

The alignment of sales and marketing is at the forefront of what makes sales enablement important. When up and running smoothly, a sales enablement strategy will create a symbiotic relationship between sales and marketing teams. This facilitates a culture with an open, continual, and constructive feedback loop with the insights to spur progressive change. It also empowers both teams to create and utilize better, more effective content. Sales teams are able to utilize content in their lead nurturing that’s on brand, optimized for conversion and SEO, and written for the persona.

how to achieve sales and marketing alignment

Furthermore, sales and marketing alignment has concrete, real benefits. When teams are aligned, they are 67% better at closing deals and drive 209% more revenue. Read more stats on smarketing alignment here.

When sales teams are enabled with content from marketing, both teams win. According to Seismic research, enabled sales reps generate 65% more revenue. What would your company do with a 65% increase in revenue? They also see a 275% increase in conversions. And the benefits to marketing? A 350% increase in content utilization, according to the research. 

sales enablement strategy

Found on HighSpot 

How to Budget for Sales Enablement

In order to ensure you’re creating a successful B2B sales enablement strategy, you’ll want to make sure you have the budget to support it. Providing the right tools, resources, and technology to increase sales performance is a must when you’re looking for innovative ways to get ahead.

When creating your sales enablement budget, consider costs that are consistent and unavoidable, as well as costs that are unexpected or a value-add to the sales enablement efforts. Here are four core areas that will help you build the foundation of your sales enablement budget: 

  1. Fixed costs: These are your expenses that stay pretty consistent even as things change. For example, salaries for the sales team, the must-have tools and solutions, cost of training, and more. If it’s necessary for the day-to-day operations, include it as a fixed cost. 
  2. Unexpected costs: No plan is perfect, so adding a little bit of padding in your budget to account for those unexpected expenses can help lessen the blow when things pop up. For example, maybe the sales team has an urgent need for an unplanned sales meeting. There are likely costs associated with that meeting or event. 
  3. Variable costs: These differ from your fixed costs in that they might fluctuate as needs change in your business. For example, travel and associated travel expenses, professional development training, contract work, etc. These aren’t necessarily must-haves, but they can help increase sales enablement’s impact. 
  4. ROI/Measurement of Success: Here you should make a case for the investment you’re making in sales enablement. Why does sales deserve the resources you’re requesting instead of a different department? Show what you anticipate the return on investment to be. For example: If you can pull in existing reports and data to support the return of each cost, that will help when you’re building your business case.  

Once you’ve created your budget, you’ll have to make a business case for each aspect of the budget in order to get the buy-in and support you need from executives, to secure the funds and resources you’re requesting. 

Getting Sales Enablement Buy-In Across the Organization 

Even though the business case for investing in sales enablement is strong, you will undoubtedly find that there are some executives and other company decision-makers who fail to see the purpose, value, and ultimately the benefits of it. According to CIO Insights, that could be why 40% of companies don’t have a dedicated sales enablement professional or program. 

Knowing that sales enablement buy-in can sometimes be an uphill battle, how do you go about getting the support you need? 

Related Reading: Sales & Marketing Automation: What it is & what it can do for B2B

Step 1: Know your Audience 

Who you’re talking to will dictate what areas of importance you should highlight. Learn what’s important to your leader or the executives you’re trying to get buy-in from. For example, when it comes to sales enablement, your CFO will want to know the potential to increase the sales reps’ contributions to revenue. A CMO will want to understand how enablement will affect and support the marketing team’s sales content creation. Your CEO might be most persuaded by improvements to profitability and retention rates. 

b2b sales enablement strategy

Identifying the key stakeholders up front and what’s most important to them will help build a stronger case for sales enablement. Each of these conversations should highlight how your b2b sales enablement strategy will improve sales productivity. 

Step 2: Let the Data Do the Talking 

Data can be a powerful tool for making a case for sales enablement. For example, take a look at the day-to-day activities of the sales team, you might find that they spend too much time creating presentations, responding to corporate emails and more. All of these things take away from the time they could and should be selling, which incurs a higher opportunity cost. 

Step 3: Show Results 

If and when sales enablement activities are established, create a regular cadence to review the results of your efforts with company leaders. This will provide insight into what activities are actually effecting change. You want to do activities that produce the desired outcomes, but that might require some trial and error to find which ones yield the best results. That’s why it’s important to monitor performance regularly and adjust accordingly. Being transparent and working together with leadership will allow you to identify what sales enablement activities are actually needed and which ones you can do without. 

Step 4: Start Small 

Getting buy-in from internal stakeholders for your sales enablement efforts can be tough if you come out of the gate full force. Especially if you go from zero to sixty with your enablement efforts. This goes back to knowing your audience. Find out what’s important to your leader and where sales can add value and start there. Once you’ve demonstrated results and built that credibility, you can make an even stronger case for expanding your sales enablement strategies. 

MarTech Assessment

At the end of the day, the goal of implementing a B2B sales enablement strategy is to empower your sales team so they can close more deals and drive more revenue and profitability for the company. By doing this you not only support your sales reps, but you create alignment between sales and marketing and everyone can work towards the ultimate goal: company success.

Best Practices for Writing B2B Sales Emails

Posted on by Danielle Carson

Writing B2B sales emails is one part art, one part science, and a whole lot of patience. To get to that elusive, perfect email you have to find the blend between friendly but not over-eager, helpful but not pushy, and naturally follow up without being annoying. 

Here are our experience-based best practices based on writing a B2B sales email.

Writing B2B Sales Emails

1) Know Your Persona

A persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal buyer according to HubSpot. Almost everything you do in sales and marketing should start with your persona, and sales emails are no different. When writing a B2B sales email, consider how technical your persona is. While you know and care about how important your product is, your email recipient may not. The CTO or head of the IT department might show interest in the highly technical aspects of your product, but you might not get the CMO to read beyond line two if you start talking about phalanges and gigahertz.

Figure out who you’re addressing and build your strategy around how to solve their pains and problems with your product using their language. 

You’re generating leads, but are they ready to talk to you? Get the guide to lead scoring and learn how to determine if your leads are sales-ready.

2) Be Helpful, Not Sales-y

Which brings me to number two- be helpful. Where impulse can lead a B2C purchase, the majority of B2B searches and buying journeys are set off by a pain point. The need to improve, prevent, encourage, scale, etc. in order to do better business. We know that those B2B buyers are eager for information and resources because 92% of B2B purchases start with search.

Use that to your advantage when you write your B2B sales emails. By knowing your persona, you should have been able to uncover the pain points they experience. By knowing your product, you should be able to relay how your product solves those pains. The key, though, is providing the content, resources, and insights to do so without giving off the used car salesman vibe. If you set out to be  authentic and your intent is to be helpful (rather than desperate for a sale), you may find your emails naturally follow in tone.

3) Offer Content and Resources 

If your sales and marketing teams are aligned, fingers crossed, you have assets to include in your sales emails that provide value. In the spirit of being helpful and not sales-y, the assets I’m talking about are not about you. Yup. You heard me right. Drag all of those sales brochure PDFs on your desktop to a new folder called “for later” and bear with me. 

B2B buyers want information. They set out to gain as much knowledge as possible, map out all their options, and typically present select solutions to their teams for final buy-in: the buyer’s journey. This all starts with knowledge. Your job is to provide that to them, via resources, to make their research process easier. As you move to conclude your follow-up process, you can include those product-specific brochures and sell sheets.

4) Create Personalization and Authenticity

Personalization in a B2B email can improve click-through rate by as much as 14% and conversion rates by 10%. It’s important to know that personalization is more than just a name. It’s mentioning a connection, noting something in common, building a bit of rapport. Doing so builds trust, authenticity, and credibility. 

Here are some ways to create personalization in your emails: 

  • Company name 
  • Noting mutual connections
  • Remembering and excluding information/resources they already found on their own
  • Tailoring content to the specific persona’s needs 
  • Including personalization tokens in the subject line
  • Sending by timezone
  • Acknowledging seasonality 

Your goal here is to identify yourself as a real human (even if you’re sending automated emails) and create a connection.

5) Add a CTA

A CTA, or call-to-action, is a way to encourage your recipient to take a specific next step. Adding one to your email can be in the form of a button or simply in hyperlinked text, but including one is a must.  Do not, however, go overboard in the ‘helpful’ department here. Try to limit the actions you’re requesting to one thing – two tops. 

You can, however, include the same CTA more than once in the same email. Having only one requested action, potentially reiterated, keeps the focus where you want it to be in order to increase your conversion rates. 

Writing B2B Tech Sales Emails

6) Include a Thoughtful Subject Line

The biggest factor in whether an email gets opened or not is the subject line. There are some fantastic recommendations for creating engaging subject lines here. In short, don’t make it about you: make it about them. Find a way to include personalization tokens, like name or company, or even pull out some of those even more personal touches if you’re mentioning them in your email.

Most importantly, be sure to test. If you’re using a CRM like HubSpot, it’s easy to run A/B tests on subject lines. (More on that here.) If you aren’t using a CRM, create a simple spreadsheet and run your own tests. Record what’s working and what’s not, and continually build on your success. 

7) Create Templates 

Creating templates for your B2B sales emails will save you time. A lot of time. And also a lot of energy and brainpower. Imagine being able to copy and paste rather than writing fresh emails multiple times a day. Doing so can help eliminate errors and typos as well.

Additionally, having templates aids in your ability to track and monitor your success rates. Does name dropping a mutual connection work better than asking for just thirty minutes of their time immediately? (I’m guessing it might). The tests you can run are endless, but you won’t be able to effectively measure what’s the most successful if you start from scratch every single time. 

Another benefit to templates is that you can use them for multiple people in your organization. If you do run those tests and find something to be highly effective, you can then get everybody into that sweet spot of selling. This also creates brand cohesion, a collective strategy, and a unified voice within your department.

8) Follow up

How many times do you follow up with your sales prospects currently? Once? Twice? Maybe three times? What if I said five times the charm? According to HubSpot, 80% of sales require five follow-ups. Starting to see how important those templates are now? 

You can read more about follow up strategies here, but the most important part I want to highlight is that you are following up. And that you’re doing it more than once. 

Related reading: 3 Lead follow up processes that will turn off your inbound leads

9) Use a CRM

Using a CRM, like HubSpot, will make your life 1,000 times easier. If you use a CRM to create your CTAs, you can track them and A/B test them easily. The same is also true for your templates and your subject lines. These little time-savers add up quickly to allow you to work more efficiently.

A CRM will also give you the ability to automate your email sends and follow-ups using those templates we just talked about. Once an email is sent, you can designate follow-ups to occur based on timing, user actions, or even user inactions. Doing so increases your win rates and reduces your workload. Find out if the HubSpot CRM is right for you here.

B2B tech sales email automation

Even if you’re not testing or automating your emails, a CRM is still beneficial because it helps you keep track of your contacts and interactions. You can assign contacts to a company, easily monitor when or if you follow-ups with somebody, and categorize your efforts into deal stages such as won, lost, bad timing, etc. to keep your efforts organized. 

Lead Scoring

Writing B2B sales emails really boils down to one thing: providing value. The meat of your email should be helpful, specific to your persona, and direct focus to one particular call-to-action. Your subject line should be catchy and your content personalized. Using a CRM aids in tracking and creates efficiencies, such as automation, that will generate more success. 

Top 6 Benefits of Using a Marketing Firm for Lead Generation

Posted on by Danielle Carson

Lead generation is one of those things that you can do alone, but probably shouldn’t. Like cutting your own hair, it’s not that deciding to do it yourself is inherently bad, but you might end up with a bowl cut straight out of 1995.

Here are the benefits of using a marketing firm for lead generation and why partnering with experts might be the best choice for your organization. 

Benefits of Using a Marketing Firm for Lead Generation

1) Alignment

Perhaps the greatest benefit of using a marketing firm for lead generation is alignment. A great firm will know that while the ultimate goal is getting more leads, you won’t be able to achieve or sustain that without alignment throughout your entire program. So what do I mean when I say ‘alignment?’ 

Related Read: Lead Generation Guide: Basics of Lead Gen

First, I’m talking about sales and marketing alignment. What a marketing firm does to increase lead gen will support sales initiatives. A firm will be focused on bringing in the high-quality types of leads that sales needs. They’ll also enable sales with tools– such as email templates, ebooks, white sheets, etc.- to help them close deals. Furthermore, a marketing firm will also encourage input from sales to create a symbiosis of feedback and continual improvement.

I’m also talking about alignment with your business objectives and goals. One benefit of working with a marketing firm on lead generation is that they can help you ramp up your current targeting or pivot to a new market segment when necessary. They’ll be able to right-size your existing program with the tools and strategies to take your company where you want to go.

2) Multi-Faceted Strategy

Additionally, a marketing firm will be able to implement multiple strategies and tactics to increase your lead generation. Firms typically have experts in varying areas of specialty- an SEO expert, a social media expert, a content expert, for example- that make up their larger team. They’ll put their heads together to create a lead gen strategy that encompasses all different angles of marketing in a cohesive way to get the best results. 

benefits of Using a Marketing Firm for Lead Generation

As your program grows, the needs of a lead generation program will change. Sometimes a paid media strategy to bring in leads isn’t always a good fit and maybe you actually need to back off on the social posting a bit. A firm will have the wherewithal and experience to implement these strategies (or not) and make changes as the program develops. Working with a marketing firm for lead generation means they will have the experience to know how – and when – to pull the right strings. 

3) Automation Experts 

A key element to lead generation is marketing automation. The right partner for your lead generation program will be an expert in this area. You can read more about the basics of marketing automation here, but in short, automation is a way to make your marketing work smarter and harder for you. Working with a marketing firm means you’ll have experts doing the setup and management on your behalf. They’ll work in your CRM to make sure incoming leads are nurtured and addressed appropriately. 

A marketing firm will also be able to set up the parameters to sort your leads for you. They’ll be able to set up the automation to make sure the job candidate leads go to HR and any complaints go to Brenda in accounting. (Just kidding. Unless you want them to…). They’ll also be able to qualify leads appropriately, which is essential as higher volumes of leads start coming in. This means that leads can be screened for fit before they ever hit the desk of your salesperson. For instance, let’s say a lead comes in that meets most of your criteria to be a good lead, but isn’t ready to buy yet. They can be automatically enrolled in a drip campaign that nurtures them along to keep you top of mind, but they won’t be handed to sales just yet. A marketing firm will be able to help you identify your criteria and set up the backend work to make it all happen.

4) KPI Reporting

Because a lead generation program has many elements, tactics, and levers, it’s easy to get lost in the reporting weeds. A marketing firm will be able to narrow your scope and focus on the KPIs. Furthermore, they’ll be able to tell you what those KPIs actually mean. So your lead volume is way up but your traffic is down- what does that mean? Is it a problem? Do we like it? There’s always a story behind the numbers. A firm will be able to read it to you. 

Benefits of Using a Marketing Firm for Lead Generation

5) Unbias Insights

Another benefit of using a marketing firm for lead generation is that you’ll have a neutral, third party present to help with decision making. They’ll use those reporting insights we just talked about along with their combined experience to offer unbias solutions on how to move forward. It can be hard to see the forest through the trees and a firm will bring a new perspective.

Partnering with a marketing firm means you’re bringing a team of people whose sole objective is to help achieve your goals. This is important because starting up a lead gen program often means changes for internal sales and marketing team. It might be a new process to handle leads or an ask to do something new. A marketing firm will be able to discuss the big picture objectives and the reasons for change to encourage your team and make them feel comfortable with it. 

6) More Leads 

This benefit was so obvious I almost forgot it, yet it needs to be said. The biggest benefit of using a marketing firm for lead generation is more leads. Nothing is ever guaranteed, but when you bring on a firm with everything stated above – expertise, alignment, automation skills, etc. – it translates into a stellar lead generation program.

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Key Takeaways

Lead generation is important. Actually, it’s critical. Without leads coming in the door, you’ll become stagnant. Working with a marketing firm for lead generation means more leads and company growth. A firm will be able to align your program with your business objectives and get your sales and marketing teams working toward a common goal. They’ll bring the experience and unbias insights needed to take your lead gen to the next level.