Lead Generation Tips for Technology Companies

Posted on November 18, 2022November 18, 2022 by Meredith Garner

A well-developed strategy to generate leads for technology companies can make all the difference between its success and failure.

Technology companies are constantly searching for new and innovative ways to attract new clients to their websites and to engage them in all steps of their search until the desired conversion.

Looking to attract new clients? This blog is for you. Discover some of the industry’s best lead generation tips for technology companies.

Lead Generation Tips for Technology Companies: How does it work?

Lead generation happens when a potential client provides tech companies with their contact information, like name, phone number, email address, and phone number, among others, in exchange for a demo, a quote, etc.

According to HubSpot, lead generation attracts prospects to your business and increases their interest through nurturing, all with the end goal of converting them into customers. Some ways to generate leads are through job applications, blog posts, coupons, live events, and online content.

This process is essential for the company since it allows you to identify the client’s interest in your service and product. It can give you an insight into your conversion. It will provide you with data that tells you what that potential client likes, want, and doesn’t know.

Also, it can help you refine your strategy and optimization solutions for your business.

A good metric to know if your lead generation strategy is adequate is looking at your conversion rate. If it is good, it tells you that your promotion is attractive to your persona.

4 Lead Generation Tips for Technology Companies

Now that we have covered the importance of generating leads for your business let’s dive into a few tips to help you achieve your goals.

1 – Provide quality information

Yes, you’ll want to provide quality information while respecting your potential client and their journey.

It’s impossible to communicate with a client if you do not know who you are talking to. That said, the first step you should take is to establish a client persona for your business. Without this information, you will be talking to either everyone or no one, which will be a waste of capital.

With a defined persona, you can create quality content and share it through the channels your clients will most likely hang around, such as Facebook or YouTube. Also, take into consideration your client’s decision-making journey. Generally, there are four steps that you can take to generate a lead or a conversion for your technology company, including:

Learning and discovery
Problem recognition
Solution considerations
Buying decision

With that predefined data, you can create a robust strategy that helps you develop high-quality content focused on generating leads.

2 – Bet on rich content

The best hook to generate leads is the creation of rich materials that align with your marketing strategy. This content works as billboards, so they need relevant content to stimulate the persona’s interest. Examples include eBooks, webinars, research, infographics, and blog posts.

Infographics, for example, the more suited they are to your audience, with eye-catching visuals and texts, the more likely people will be to engage with them. eBooks are excellent tools for creating authority.

Trials and webinars are other materials that can contribute to lead generation for tech companies. A trial allows a client to try the product for free for a limited time, which can assist a client in making the final decision since they will know how the product works and can help them solve their problems.

Webinars are live or recorded online events, commonly used as a sales strategy, with a potentially low cost since all you need is a computer and a camera.

Blogs are still one of the most successful tools for generating leads. They allow the reader to learn more about an exciting topic and give you data that will assist you in creating future articles.

3 – Utilize call-to-actions

We have seen multiple marketing campaigns where the tech company forgets to add a crucial element to their campaigns, a compelling call-to-action to drive potential customers to your landing page. Your persona will define your call-to-action or CTA.

A mistake we usually see is driving a potential customer to the homepage of your website. For the CTA to drive good results, it should send the users to a specific landing page. For example, if you want to offer an e-book, a downloadable link must be present on that landing page.

4 – Invest in Paid Media campaigns

Another strategy that can help boost lead generation for your technology company is to invest in paid media campaigns, such as Google Search, Google Display, Facebook/Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. After all, people need to be able to find you online.

For your campaigns to be successful and to start seeing an increase in lead generation, you need to encompass all the tips listed above. Have a well-structured campaign with keywords, text ads, images, videos, and CTAs relevant to your persona that will identify with your business, services, and products and will most likely take the desired action to convert.

Custom Lead Generation Tips for Technology Companies with Lake One

There are a variety of strategies, advice, tips, or ideas on how to boost your lead generation marketing campaigns.

Here at Lake One, we help you in your paid media and marketing efforts, such as finding your persona, brainstorming and creating rich content, and managing your paid media efforts. Contact us today!

How Marketing Automation Implementation Helps Tech Companies Scale

Posted on October 18, 2022October 18, 2022 by Mark Boyts

You can utilize marketing automation implementation to fill the gaps to help your company scale without adding additional employees. Your company can set up automation through various applications; however, it is primarily utilized in CRMs.

Want to implement automation to help your company scale? Discover more below.

Marketing Automation Implementation: Brief Overview of The Process

Marketing automation is a tool that helps automate marketing tasks to help businesses save time and money.

That said, the marketing automation implementation process helps businesses automate their marketing processes, such as email campaigns, social media updates, and website content updates. This way, they can use the saved time and money for other aspects of their business.

Why Marketing Automation Implementation is Critical for Efficient Business Management

The marketing automation implementation process involves automating various marketing activities from lead generation, lead nurturing, scoring, and routing. It enables marketers to execute their marketing strategy more efficiently and automates marketing tasks and campaigns to get more done in less time.

Startups, tech companies, and small businesses use marketing automation tools to save time and resources while focusing on their core business activities. For large enterprises, marketing automation is the key to efficient business management and helps focus on customer acquisition and retention.

Additionally, companies of all sizes use marketing automation software. It gives companies leverage to place various marketing goals, like those wanting to grow their businesses or build a customer loyalty program. You can use marketing automation for multiple purposes, including lead generation, lead nurturing, content management, and campaign management.

The Benefits of Marketing Automation That You Probably Don’t Know About Yet

Marketing automation implementation encompasses programming for specific marketing tasks, such as sending emails, analyzing data, and triggering social media posts.

You can implement marketing automation either manually or automatically. If you implement it automatically, an artificial intelligence system analyzes data and triggers specific actions based on the results.

Another benefit involves assistance with content marketing. Your business can quickly and effectively boost content production by automatically generating blog posts or other content pieces.

Implementing marketing automation software has many benefits, from increased productivity to automating repetitive tasks. Your business will experience:

Reduced time spent on manual work
Increased customer engagement through personalized content and automated campaigns
Enhanced sales pipeline through lead generation
Decreased cost per acquisition due to higher conversion rates from automated campaigns
Better ROI due to lower price per acquisition rate for automated campaigns.

Marketing Automation Implementation with Lake One

Automation comes in all shapes and sizes, but its goal across all platforms is to make your company more efficient. More efficiencies across your business allow your employees more time to accomplish other tasks, making your business more productive.

Contact Lake One today to level up your automation game.

The Best Paid Media Dashboards for Measuring Success

Posted on July 15, 2022July 28, 2022 by Meredith Garner

Paid media dashboards are a critical tool to utilize in your marketing efforts if you aren’t already. Dashboards help you make quicker decisions, increase sales, reduce costs per acquisition (CPA), improve conversions, create engagement, and increase brand value. But not all dashboards are created equal. In fact, the wrong visualization or KPIs can do more harm than good when trying to communicate to others or identify trends.

Continue reading below to discover the most effective paid media dashboards for your campaigns.

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Python Custom Code for HubSpot

Posted on June 7, 2022June 13, 2022 by Mark Boyts

Why is python custom code necessary? Better yet – why is it important to HubSpot?

With the introduction of Operations Hub, HubSpot has opened up a whole new world of solutions to previously unsolvable problems within their application.

With the ability to adjust data in-app, add custom-coded solutions to workflows, and sync data with apps that were previously tricky integrations, relying on third-party tools to solve these issues is becoming a thing of the past.

Learn more about python custom code for HubSpot and how it can help your business below.

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Lead Generation Guide Part II: Techniques, Tools and Tips

Posted on October 8, 2020March 11, 2021 by Lake One

In part one of our series, we talked about some of the pros and cons associated with lead generation and some tools to help combat the challenges. (Click here if you missed it.) Now we’re going to share with you some techniques to actually generate those elusive leads we all covet so much. Let’s start by thinking of your lead gen strategies and program as a toolbox. These tactics are all just tools in there to use at your disposal. Some you’ll use, some you won’t. You might have a favorite that gets the job done every time and another that you only pull out to tackle special projects. There’s a mix of old school and new school lead gen tactics. Take a look and find the ones that will help you build a successful lead gen strategy.

Ultimate Library of B2B Marketing Automation Recipes

Posted on July 28, 2020February 22, 2023 by Rachael

With B2B marketing automation, you can serve the right content to the right person at the right time – at scale. You can also drive consistency and efficiency with internal processes. And not to mention, it just might be my favorite tool in our marketing tech stack.

So, how does marketing automation apply in the real world? Here are some of our top tried and true must-have B2B marketing automation examples.

What is B2B Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is a technology that allows you to automate, streamline, and measure your marketing tasks and workflows.
However, its true power comes through sales and marketing alignment combined with a well-utilized B2B CRM.

Sales & Marketing Alignment in Automation

If it feels like your sales and marketing teams are on different planets, adding automation to the mix won’t solve that. Ensure your teams align by outlining responsibilities, defining key terms like lead statuses and lifecycle stages, and aligning your team goals.

Reaching total harmony among teams can be a process, but at a minimum, it should be an active joint effort.

B2B Marketing Examples for Sales Collaboration and Internal Processes

Marketing automation helps to facilitate collaboration between sales and marketing in real time. It’s the conduit between the two teams. These processes within B2B businesses center around sales collaboration and the facilitation of internal processes.

Automation for Sales Collaboration

Sales collaboration occurs in various ways, but some of the marketing automation examples outlined below are the most common.

Lead Scoring

Not all leads are created equal, and for that very reason, we leverage lead scoring. Lead scoring ranks lead readiness to convert based on the lead’s behavior. The idea behind lead scoring is that a lead can take specific actions or engagements which speak to their sales readiness. For example, a user who is highly engaged on the site, downloading multiple offers, visiting key pages (like pricing), and signing up for the blog, etc., is, in theory, more ready to purchase than a user who visited one or two pages on the site a couple of times.

Lead scoring allows a sales and marketing team to work together to develop criteria identifying leads likely to purchase so that Sales can follow up with them. How to do this will be different for each CRM. In HubSpot, you set up your behaviors and scores and then create a workflow or a list to send all leads who meet your threshold to sales automatically.

Setting Leads to Marketing Qualified & Assigning to Sales

This next section applies to setting any lifecycle stage or lead status. However, we’ll focus on Marketing Qualified Leads because that lifecycle stage is a must and a big factor in measuring marketing ROI.

Again each CRM will be different, but in HubSpot, our favorite way to achieve this is by creating an MQL List. The list includes all of our specific MQL criteria like the following:

The role is (insert the desired role)
The company name is known
The phone number is known
The industry is (insert the desired industry)
And the lead source is none of offline

Note: MQL criteria setting is part of the sales & marketing alignment process and should be revisited at a minimum twice a year.

Once your list is built with your set criteria, you can create a workflow that notifies sales or makes a task for the MQL to be reviewed by sales.

Recommended Reading: 5 Ways Marketing Automation Can Boost Lead Volume

Automation for Internal Processes

B2B companies often have complex business processes. B2B marketing automation can drive efficiencies and allow real-time routing, task creation, and follow-up across functions and channels.

Lead Routing

Is your sales team divided into territories or divided by certain products, services, or areas of expertise? If so, lead routing is your ticket to removing the manual review of leads and automatically routing by key differentiators. You’ll always start with a form submission and follow with if/then branches or conditionals to route leads.

For example: If a contact fills out the “Demo Request” form and their country is set to the U.S., then assign Frank as the contact owner and create a task for Frank to review.

Data Governance/Management

It’s also common that workflows be used to ensure your CRM stays up to date and with as many properties completed as possible. We can use workflows to manage some of the following:

Subscription Types: If contacts fill out forms such as a newsletter sign-up, a webinar, product updates, etc. You can manage their subscriptions on the back end with workflows.
Opt-Outs: If you want to keep a running master opt-out list, you can create a workflow that states if a contact opts out of communication, add them to a specific list.
Contact Owners: Similar to the lead routing scenario, you can use workflows to ensure all contacts have an owner. Or, if they don’t, use a workflow to create a task for a sales leader to review.

Copying Across Property Types: This might vary depending on your CRM, but you are likely using different types of properties or objects to store your data. For example, a company record or contact record. In some cases, the information should be the same in both places. Rather than duplicating efforts, use a workflow to copy the value from one property to another.

B2B Marketing Automation Examples for Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is cultivating relationships with potential buyers at every stage of the sales process and through the buyer’s journey. It focuses on meeting buyers where they are, listening, and providing helpful, relevant information.

B2B marketing automation allows you to create lead nurturing campaigns, also known as email drip campaigns. These are a series of emails spread over time that help buyers move from awareness to consideration to decision.

When it comes to what emails to include, how many, and what frequency, it depends on your persona’s needs, your buying cycle, and the action the contact took. Nurturing campaigns are not ‘set it and forget it.’ Email open rates and engagement through marketing attribution reporting will be your workflow gut check and point you toward areas for optimization.

Lead to MQL Nurturing & Beyond

Lead to MQL nurturing is a common point in the buyer’s journey in which nurturing can start. It is initiated by a contact downloading a piece of content. From there, you offer the lead relevant information that may help them solve the pain point that initially brought them to your site. Along the way, you give them plenty of opportunities to convert with additional content and CTAs.

The goal is to nurture the lead until they become a Marketing Qualified Lead and meets your set criteria. From there, queue sales!

Form Submission Follow-Up

Depending on the type of form a contact submits, you might not need a full-blown workflow, maybe a simple thank you will suffice? If so, workflows are your ticket. They can easily go from a 10-email sequence, as mentioned above, to a one-and-done thank you for your submission email.

Pro Tip: Take your ‘Contact Us’ form submissions to the next level by sending a follow-up email post submission letting your contacts know when they can expect to hear from you in response to their inquiry.

Date-Based Marketing Automations

If you have a CRM like HubSpot, workflows don’t have to be based solely on a contact property; they can be date-based too! This is perfect for webinars, trade shows, and other events. Date-based workflows can handle the following:

Leading up to an event
During an event
Post-event follow up

Marketing Automation Optimizations

Okay, you set up all of the B2B marketing automation above. That means you’re done and can move on to the next initiative, right?

via GIPHY

If the ‘how about no sloth’ didn’t give it away, the answer is ‘no.’ The setup is only the beginning. Sales and marketing automation tools typically come with better reporting capabilities, and you should totally use them. Whether it’s lead flows, MQLs, or subscriptions, reviewing and optimizing your B2B marketing automation workflows are a must.

Also, it’s worth noting that a part of the story can’t always be seen in the data. Take the time to talk to the teams and solicit feedback. Is automation working? Is it missing the mark? Meeting on a regular cadence will help uncover those issues too.

Lake One Can Help With B2B Marketing Automation

So tell us, did you like the examples? Are we missing one of your favorites? Sales and marketing automation can save you time and help your B2B business scale. We’d love to chat if you’re considering incorporating automation into your sales and marketing strategy.

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

Posted on July 7, 2020July 5, 2020 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Posted on January 30, 2020July 14, 2020 by Rachael

You likely know that sales and marketing alignment is our jam. We are all about the two teams communicating openly and working towards common goals. But did you also know that we are all about working smarter? Sales and marketing automation can help you with some of the heavy lifting allowing you to scale and spend your time on the things that matter most to your business.

Despite the joint naming, sales automation and marketing automation serve distinct purposes within an organization. In this post, we’ll define both sales and marketing automation and share some of our top tips for implementation.

What is Sales Automation?

HubSpot defines sales automation as the mechanization of manual, time-consuming sales tasks using software, artificial intelligence (AI), and other digital tools.

With the sales team focused on one to one communication, automation can help with prospecting and outreach and cut down on response time, making sales uber efficient. More specifically, sales automation helps with:

Lead distribution
Lead follow-up emails
Meeting scheduling
Sales quotes/proposals
Customer onboarding
Lead scoring
Approvals
Lead qualification

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is using software to automate marketing activities such as email marketing, social posting, and reporting.

With the marketing team focused on communicating to a group of people, (ideally targeted to personas), automation adds scalability and also personalization. Without marketing automation, it’s nearly impossible to include personalization at the scale needed for most B2B businesses.

Marketing automation helps to accomplish the following:

Updated tracking
Real-time alerts
Automated lead-hand off
Forms
Landing pages
Social post scheduling
Emails
Lead nurturing
Lead qualification

Did we mention you can use marketing automation to outsource lead gen? Read more.

Sales & Marketing Automation Tips for B2B

If you’re either considering sales and marketing automation for your business or your current efforts aren’t going so well, this next section is for you. Here are our top five sales and marketing automation tips.

Tip #1: It starts with alignment

If it feels like your sales and marketing teams are on different planets, adding automation to the mix won’t solve that. It’s best to have a meeting of the minds first. There you should outline responsibilities, define key terms and align your goals.

Alignment can be a process, but at a minimum, it should be an active process.

Tip #2: Don’t overbuy

Underutilized technology can be a costly expenditure. Not every company needs sales and marketing automation and not every company needs all the bells and whistles of enterprise-grade solutions. Being aligned as a team will help you hone in on the features that are necessary.

Here are some questions for consideration when evaluating the needs of your teams:

Are you struggling to segment and prioritize leads?
Do your leads require nurturing?
Is your sales team struggling to find the time to follow up with leads?
Are you leveraging your content?
Do you know where your teams are coming from?
How are leads handed off?

Tip #3: Have a plan

Sales and marketing automation can be great, but not without a plan. Having an agreed-upon strategy of what matters to your organization will help you select the tech that meets your needs and execute day to day.

Automation isn’t the entire strategy, but it’s part of it.

Tip #4: Who owns automation?

Bringing on new technology can sometimes have people asking, “Who’s on first?” We strongly recommend appointing an automation internal champion. This person is responsible for adoption, consistency and holding teams accountable.

Tip #5: Don’t forget you’re marketing and selling to humans

When it comes to automation, you can have too much of a good thing because at the end of the day, you’re still marketing and selling to humans. No one wants to engage and converse with a robot, especially if the buyer is in the decision stage.

Make sure to:

Monitor replies to your automated your messaging
Use personalization
Practice social listening
Analyze the data and optimize

Avoid these B2B email nurture mistakes that will leave your leads dead in the water.

Tip #5: Automation isn’t set it and forget it

C’mon. Is there anything in sales or marketing that is set it and forget it? The answer is no. There isn’t. Sales and marketing automation tools typically come with better reporting capabilities. Use it!

Also, there’s part of the story that can’t always be seen in the data. Take the time to talk to the teams and solicit feedback.

Sales and marketing automation can save you time and help your B2B business scale. If you’re considering incorporating automation into your sales and marketing strategy, we’d love to chat.

Is a HubSpot CRM Right for Me? 7 Questions to Consider

Posted on August 9, 2019January 12, 2021 by Ryan

If you do a Google search for “easy to use CRM” you’ll return more than 50 million results. Why so many? Because people hate using CRMs. Back in 2001, Gartner measured a 50% CRM failure rate. Chief among the reasons: lack of focus, complexity, and lack of commitment or buy-in. I’ve worked across multiple CRMs from Salesforce to HubSpot. As our client work spans marketing and sales teams, we inevitable tackle the CRM question. Many times we get asked, “Is a HubSpot CRM is right for our company?”. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. This is how we help our clients answer this question.

TL;DR

If your organization matches any of the following, the HubSpot CRM might be a good fit for you:

You’ve struggled to adopt a CRM,
You’ve struggled to align sales and marketing
Your sales processes aren’t extremely complex
You like access to support without large costs
You’re looking for a functional CRM without blowing the bank.

Don’t go it alone. Let’s figure out your best CRM option together.

Where are you in your CRM journey?

If you’re relatively new to CRM, or an organization that’s struggled to adopt CRM across functions, HubSpot can be a great option. It’s been built to drive ease of adoption. Its integration to email inbox makes managing contacts easy, and it let’s reps spend more time selling and less time updating contact records.

Are your sales and marketing teams in alignment?

If you’re looking to drive alignment throughout your marketing machine through the lead management – and you’re using the HubSpot marketing platform, HubSpot sales is a smart addition. Rather than adding more tools and tech to the mix, keeping with one platform helps drive data quality and reporting consistency. (Ps- Here’s a way to check your Smarketing alignment if you need it.)

How complex are your sales processes?

Generally, the more complex the sales process gets, the more time you need to put into your B2B CRM strategy. If your organization struggles with CRM adoption and aligning your sales and marketing team around consistent processes – HubSpot’s CRM is a great entry point to building your sales and marketing data muscle.

Having a sales & marketing Service Level Agreement can help streamline your process. Here’s what ours looks like.

What kind of support and training do you need?

How do you learn best? Are you a self teacher who can poke around new software with ease? HubSpot is an intuitive CRM with a fantastic knowledge base and support team. If you’re looking to get a CRM up and running fast, you’ll be hard-pressed to find better support resources without shelling out thousands of dollars for training or administrators.

What kind of efficiency would your sales team benefit from?

Ironically, sales reps spend the minority of their time actually selling. Too often they’re stuck with the administration of their CRM. HubSpot’s CRM is loaded with easy to use tools to drive sales rep efficiency so they can spend more time selling and less time administering software.

What’s your budget threshold for software?

How much do you want to invest in your CRM? Consider all the costs. Subscription fees – term – setup and ongoing maintenance – support. If you’re looking for a budget-friendly CRM with some horsepower, HubSpot might be the right fit for you.

What are your reporting needs?

Generally speaking, the more robust your reporting needs are, the more HubSpot may not be able to deliver. There are a lot of reporting options available within HubSpot, and with the reporting add-on, you can accomplish more. But compared with enterprise-level CRM, this is one area where the CRM doesn’t always stack up.

Practical Ways to Implement A/B Testing on Conversion Funnels

Posted on July 30, 2019November 4, 2019 by Danielle Carson

A conversion funnel is what we call the path a user follows to convert on a landing page. You can read more about the basics here, but the parts that make up a conversion funnel are the CTA, Landing Page, Thank You Page, and the Thank You Email. As marketers and business people, we want people to convert, but sometimes our marketing underperforms or our guts say that good performance could be better. So then we test. Here are practical ways to implement A/B testing on conversion funnels and improve their performance.

A/B Testing CTAs

CTA testing in HubSpot could not be any easier. By creating two versions of your CTAs- A and B- HubSpot will naturally serve the CTAs equally. When running multivariate CTA testing, we’re focusing the majority of our attention on the Click Rates because clicks are the main goal of a CTA. Submission rates are a secondary factor because they are mostly an indication of your landing page performance. The caveat here is relevance, though. High clicks and low submission rates can be an indication that the promise of your CTA is incongruent with that of your landing page. The messaging of one or the other may need to be adjusted.

Not all leads are created equal! Download our Lead Scoring Guide to learn how to automate your lead qualification.

In this example, version A and B were created at the same time. After a few months of testing, both have nearly identical views, but the clicks on version B are a full percentage point higher. At this point, since we have a decent amount of data, it might be time to create a new version “A” to see if we can beat or at least match version B.

A/B Testing Landing Pages

HubSpot also makes implementing A/B testing on landing pages super easy. What you’re looking at when testing landing pages are submissions. WordStream tells us we want 10% or higher to be considered among the best. Some of the things you could vary are your headlines and copy. You can even try testing the medium of your offer- guide vs eBook vs infographic etc.- to see what your audience is more compelled to utilize.

One of the biggest advantages to A/B testing a landing page is to see how the length of a form affects your submissions. As marketers, we of course want as much data as we can get, but we also know that there’s a breaking point in what we request. High-value offers have a higher threshold for longer forms. To test, create two variants of your landing page- one with a shorter form and one with a more complex form- to find out where your persona’s threshold is. If you can get away with having a longer form and requesting more information without your submissions rates suffering, go for it.

If you’re not sure where to start with your landing page testing, you can try setting up heat mapping to see exactly how your users are interacting with your page. You might find people are leaving right away (a better headline or more appealing design, perhaps?) or abandoning the form (shorten that sucker up!). Bounce rates can also indicate where to start.

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A/B Testing Thank You Pages

You create Thank You Pages (TYPs) variants the same way you do Landing Pages in HubSpot. So what are you looking for here? Engagement. You want people to access their offer (via a link or a button) and then go on to engage with the site. This is where you have the opportunity to move them through the funnel or charm them with delight. You can create full variants of your TYP or try testing a CTA within your TYP as we discussed above.

A/B Testing Thank You Emails (Kind of)

Thank You Emails are the automated emails that send after a user submits a form. They can be set up directly on the landing page form or via a workflow. Unfortunately, you cannot implement A/B testing of automated emails in HubSpot. But, there are a few ways to get around it. What you want to measure by testing thank you emails are your open rates and click rates.

Open rates are correlated to the strength of your subject line. To test, benchmark your current views and opens then manually make and publish your updates to the same email. Allow your updates to gather data and then measure performance against your benchmarked data. Rinse and repeat.

You can test the click rates in your thank you emails by creating multivariate CTAs as discussed in the CTA section above. You can also manually update the copy and hyperlinks to your “next step” offer (whatever action you’ve included in your TYE that you want your user to take next such as downloading a different offer or contacting you for a consult). Benchmark your stats and revisit often to check the efficacy of your updates.