Many marketing dollars and hours have been spent focused on the initial acquisition of a lead through trade shows and conferences, search engine marketing, list acquisition, referrals, cold calls, banner ads, etc. It's a non-ending list and highly dependent on the marketing dollars available to any given organization.

For the past 30 years in technology marketing, there tended to be little focus on what happens after a lead is handed off to sales. Over the past 5 years, this has changed dramatically in large measure due to the ability to really track a lead from initial acquisition through the entire sales cycle - whether shorter or longer. The reasons are simply because affordable tools now exist for startups, medium and large enterprises. The success of SalesForce made tracking practical - and there is simply no reason that any size organization should not be tracking leads through a closed-loop process. In addition, marketing automation tools that integrate with SalesForce (or other CRM products) now enable marketing to continuously nurture leads after acquisition and to be able to track responses, shared with sales for immediate follow-up.

Gone are the days of tossing leads over the cubical walls and guessing as to what happened. It's a new world for organizations of all sizes to drive cost effective marketing programs based on metrics, transparency and visibility.

Email Nurturing Programs/Marketing Automation

• Provides information without having to take the time to go find it
• Is unobtrusive and not considered spam
• Moves the prospect through the education stages of the buying cycle - and even beyond.

The major difference between an effective email nurturing program and spam is the regularity of the touch, the quality of the content and the relevance of the message. With the proper mix and tone in the emails, you can build your brand, be perceived as a market leader and make sure that you continuously touch the leads your organization has acquired without a drain on sales resources. An email nurturing program removes the burden of the "education" phase of a sales process from sales and ensures that when a suspect/prospect is ready to consider a solution in your area that he/she will contact you.

An effective email nurturing program, with the right tools also provides a continuous list of contacts for your (typically inside) sales team to follow-up with. As one sales rep from an Opine client said: "These campaigns definitely do make a difference to the outcome of our efforts."

With Opine Consulting managing your email nurturing program , this is the type of response you can receive from one of your prospects:

"Of all of our outside vendors, I would have to say your email have been the most useful and/or entertaining. I won't be ready to revisit opportunities until next year, but please keep me on your email list."

Yes, they aren't ready to move forward today, but when they are...you can be sure that your company will be on the short list, if not the only vendor on the list.

Opine Consulting can also help you determine which marketing automation tool is the right one for your environment. We have expertise and experience with Marketo, Eloqua, eTrigue, Manticore Technology, Silverpop (Vtrenz) and Predictive Response. In addition, we have experience with typical email tools such as Vertical Response and Mail Chimp. Decising which tool to purchase is just the start. We also help our clients completely setup, install and customize them to meet the specitic needs. This can be done as a stand-alone engagement or in conjunction with defining a closed loop lead - sales process. With our expertise in Salesforce, we hold both Salesforce Admin Certification and Salesforce Consulting Certification, you can be sure that we will look at both your marketing automation and CRM as one system to drive the most revenue for your company and ease of use for your marketing and sales teams..

Closed Loop Lead-Sales Process

A closed loop lead-sales process translates into information across the entire life-cycle of a prospect/customer. Every department can gain valuable information:

• Marketing
• Visibility on which leads are most effective
• Assist decisions on demand generation spending
• Product marketing feedback on effective messages/products/pricing
• Sales
• Forecasting and predictability
• Pipeline needed to drive revenue goals
• Control with organization not individual, even with personnel & partner changes
• Better effectiveness with mix of sales resources (inside, outside, direct, partner)
• Support
• Problem report visibility
• Coverage/Renewals
• Contacts
• Executive Management and Operations
• Manufacturing visibility into what products are needed
• Make decisions when there is still time to act

Opine Consulting has experience implementing closed loop leads-sales processes. We can help with all aspects including sales process definition as well as implementing your existing sales process in SalesForce. We can also analyze your marketing needs and recommend the most appropriate marketing automation. We have direct experience with Eloqua, eTrigue, Manticore, Predictive Response and Vtrenz so we understand the positives and negatives of each one.