marketing automation

5 Tips to Measuring B2B Marketing Initiatives

March 19, 2018 by Daniel Laws Leave a Comment

The business-to-business (B2B) sales and marketing roles are continuously evolving because of social selling, marketing automation, mobile devices, and more. According to Biznology, today’s sales process takes about 22% longer than 5 years ago. So, how does your business measure the effectiveness of sales and marketing campaigns? Below is a brief list of tips to successfully measure your B2B marketing initiatives:

Know Your Sales Pipeline Calculations

We get calls all the time from businesses that want to increase their sales and revenue. Unfortunately, not all businesses take the time to access their sales pipeline and calculate what it will take to achieve their goals and objectives.

How many prospects do you need to call to book a meeting?
How many meetings turn into a quote?
What’s your quote-to-close ratio?

Knowing this information will give you a sense of your potential budget needed to create the incremental volume necessary while also determining whether or not your goals are realistic. You will also have visibility into phases in the sales pipeline that are under performing.

Capture Progress of the Sales Pipeline

It’s no secret that sales reps hate manually entering data. In fact, 23% of salespeople cite manual data entry as the biggest challenge using their existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system (HubSpot, 2017). Capturing the progress of the sales pipeline in your CRM allows you to measure the impact of each sale or prospective customer’s actions. This will improve the sales forecast or closing ratio. The incentive for your business and the sales reps is to help focus on which actions will generate high revenue and sales. Use marketing automation to work on your sales reps behalf.

Access the Impact Marketing is Having on the Sales Funnel

So, you just want more sales but do you respect the sales funnel? The sales funnel is the buying process that companies lead customers through when purchasing products or services. The goal of your marketing is to have prospects enter the sales process to solve your customer’s problem. Access the impact your marketing is having on moving prospects through the funnel. Your business won’t increase its sales until more prospects move through your sales process.

Create a Measurement Plan for B2B Sales & Marketing Campaigns

A measurement plan is a document that translates your business objectives into metrics that can measure your website’s offline sales. It provides a framework to customize the configuration of your digital analytics and sales funnel. It is a vital part of your digital marketing strategy and will guide you to set realistic expectations. If you can’t get to raw numbers to calculate the metrics, can you really measure it?

Report Only on B2B KPIs That Matter

There are so many reports, dashboards, and analyses , but whichget to the point of your marketing and sales campaigns? Narrow down the metrics to your key performance indicators (KPIs) so that you’re not looking at every metric associated with your business to business (B2B) marketing and sales initiatives – only the ones that matter.

Check out Pipedrive (CRM) to improve your sales & marketing campaign tracking. Already measuring sales and marketing? Let us know your thoughts and add to the list of tips.

DaBrian Marketing Partners with Pipedrive to Deliver Integrated Sales and Marketing Solution

January 17, 2018 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

DaBrian Marketing Group added Pipedrive to its suite of client solutions. The strategic move will help area businesses improve their lead nurturing processes and accelerate sales cycles by fully integrating their marketing automation platforms and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. DaBrian will provide configuration, integrations, support and consulting to better align sales & marketing efforts for clients and allow them to extract the most value from Pipedrive.

Automatically Update Contacts

DaBrian Marketing Group’s marketing automation solution fully integrates with Pipedrive, allowing businesses to instantly sync contact information across both platforms. Any customers or leads added to or updated by sales and support teams are instantly connected with marketing efforts, and vice versa – eliminating the need for manual import/export. The automation removes human error from the data entry process and saves time. After an initial set-up by DaBrian Marketing Group, Pipedrive’s continuous integration does all the work to keep marketing, sales and support information aligned. This ensures consistency in data between systems and enhances database segmentation, lead nurturing, lead scoring and many other contact handling functions.

Push Marketing Insights to Sales Team

Businesses can now use Pipedrive to connect leads directly to the campaigns that generated them, allowing managers to focus their teams’ sales efforts and providing context to those sales conversations. DaBrian’s marketing automation platform will identify the most effective marketing channels and the most active prospects, directing the sales team where to increase efforts. Integrating marketing information with Pipedrive also allows members of the sales team to more effectively target prospects and personalize their messages. Better understanding the sources, preferred channels and interactions of prospects with marketing efforts arms sales forces with the insights they need to close more deals.

Simple CRM that Drives Profits

Pipedrive was developed by salespeople, for salespeople. In addition to integrating information between marketing automation platforms and customer relationship management systems, Pipedrive helps simplify and organize the sales process. Users can be up and running in less than 3 minutes and it’s easy to add or remove team members. Salespeople are notified about key prospect activities to ensure timely follow-up. And the solution comes with native mobile applications to increase convenience and productivity. An attractive user interface and graphic pipeline representations further increase usability and effectiveness. The CRM starts at $10 per user, per month for subscription.

About DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC

Founded in 2008, DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC is a full-service digital marketing agency that provides original strategic digital marketing solutions for businesses. DaBrian Marketing Group’s digital marketing services include email marketing, digital branding, search engine optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising, web hosting, web design, web analytics, social media marketing, and more. Company headquarters is centrally located at 500 Penn Street, Suite 201, Reading, Pennsylvania 19602. For more information about DaBrian Marketing Group, visit dabrianmarketing.com or call 610.743.5602.

About Pipedrive

Founded in 2010 by seasoned sales pros, Pipedrive is a sales CRM solution designed to help salespeople rather than control them. It is built on a proven selling framework that gives visibility into the pipeline and drives actions that push deals to close consistently. Pipedrive is serving more than 60,000 customers worldwide with corporate offices in New York and Estonia. Pipedrive ranks no. 14 on the Inc. 5000 list as one of America’s fastest growing private software companies. For more information, go to www.pipedrive.com.

What is Marketing Automation?

September 25, 2017 by Daniel Laws 1 Comment

Marketing automation is software that helps businesses automate marketing and sales initiatives to generate more leads, close more deals, and measure marketing success better. It gives businesses the power to take action based on the behaviors of prospective customers. On average, 51% of companies are currently using this tactic. With more than half of B2B companies (58%) planning to adopt this technology shortly.

How can marketing automation help your business?

Using a marketing automation software can help your business to improve efficiencies, personalize your marketing messages, connect marketing to closed sales deals, and measure your strategy effectively. To some degree, you can set-up marketing campaigns and leave it on “autopilot” while focusing on other business objectives. When used effectively, it will align your sales and marketing teams towards a common goal.

What are some features of marketing automation tool?

Below are few common features:

Lead Scoring – score prospects based on behavior so you can followup with proactive prospects.

Lead Nurturing – automatically stay in communication with prospective customers through the sales process

Prospect Tracking – identifies activities that prospects have interacted with on your website or marketing

Email Marketing – email design templates to send, test, and measure the effectiveness.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tool Integrations – connecting your leads with marketing activities that closed deals.

Integrated Reporting – see where leads come from, which campaigns are working, and the number of deals closed

This is just a brief list of the options it provides. With technology always improving, there are bound to be many more to come.

Should your company be using it?

If you have a contact database and are proactively marketing your company’s products or services, YES. The saying goes, “80% of sales come from 20% of advertising.” Marketing automation will provide some clarity into specifically which advertising efforts are working. By measuring your funnel, you can identify issues to the process and create strategies to improve conversion rates.

What do you need to know about marketing automation software?

It all starts with a strategy. Without a strategy, you have no chance of success! Marketing automation software can be complex, so start with the fundamentals and grow from there. It’s important to have standards for your contact data and keep it organized. Otherwise, you’ll end up with garbage in your CRM which will cause your marketing automation to be ineffective..

Lastly, you must have or create relevant content in different formats (text, images, gif, video, data sheets, case studies, etc.). Relevant content is king, and without it, you are just a peasant in your industry!

If you want more on marketing automation, drop us a line or comment with your feedback or suggestion.

Your Business Technology as Marketing – Mike Sutton, Guest Blogger

May 9, 2017 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

Check out this educational guest-blog post and video from Mike Sutton at TS Tech.

Would you go out to a business mixer or shoot a promo video in a dingy old shirt? Of course not, because you know your appearance sends a message about your professionalism and competence.

But what about your operations process? Or your technology infrastructure?

Everything you do sends signals to your market and the people around you. Sometimes, like with your marketing and sales messaging, those signals are carefully crafted and intentional. But other times, they are not as closely managed.

When you communicate, it’s not just the content, but also the timing, style, and medium that signals your professionalism, responsiveness, and attention to detail. Consistency and clarity in your follow-ups say a lot about your quality and competence as a service provider. Your efficiency shines through when you can address inquiries quickly and accurately the first time.

Your internal operations process and technology integration can have a huge impact on your ability to do these things. I’m going to touch on three areas where your operations and technology act as marketing for your company.

Client Touch Points

Do you have a way to easily and consistently follow up with clients and prospects that serves to keep them informed, feel connected to the process, and helps to effectively manage expectations? Automated status updates to clients and follow-up reminders to you triggered by relevant events and timing can reinforce the appearance that you are responsive and competent. This kind of effective communication will add value and build relationships and trust in a way that can’t be matched.

High Quality Integrated Experience

If your ordering, customer service, billing, and delivery systems are properly integrated, it will not only make your life easier, but it will impress and satisfy your client’s desire for ease, convenience, and accuracy. Proper integration reduces mistakes and workload. This will not only make you more profitable, it will help you keep costs down and retain clients.

Efficiency Is a Win-Win

Technology is a resource multiplier. By properly equipping your team and integrating your systems you will be able to do more for a bigger market with fewer people. You keep costs down and deliver a high quality product or service. And your clients get fast, reliable, consistently good service. This creates a loyal fanbase and good word-of-mouth marketing.

Business Technology Is a Tool

When effectively implemented, technology will improve quality, productivity, consistency, and efficiency in a way that supports your strategic vision, goals, and objectives. If it’s your goal to be a budget solution provider, the efficiency of properly integrating your systems will be invaluable. If you desire to be a best-in-class provider and a price leader, leveraging your technology to deliver a top-notch, fully integrated client experience while maximizing quality and profitability will be invaluable to your organization.

The bottom line is that what you do and how you do it will deliver more impact than what you say, so make sure that your actions match your words. If you’re out there saying you’re the best in your industry, your infrastructure and process had better back that up.

If you’re looking for additional ideas on how to digitally transform your business, please check out my 20-minute video presentation on Digital Transformation for your business. I share over a dozen case studies and ideas to digitally transform your business that I’ve either used personally or with my clients to increase market share, expand to new markets, or maximize profit, revenue, and opportunity. You can find the video at tst.io/dabrian.