Dating in the New Millennium (Change in the buying process)

The internet has changed our buying process for most things. In business to business transactions the old buying process involved the buyer calling up the sales rep early in their research phase and inviting them to come in to present their wares. In the new buying process the buyer quietly engages with you through online research, and will rarely call the sales person and invite them in to present. To be successful we must adapt our selling process to match the new buying process. We must recognize that buyers want and even prefer online dialogues prior to engaging with a sales person. And we cannot expect the online dialogue to be a mirror image of the old sales process. For most business to business activities the online dialogue begins when one establishes a single contact with a suspect either because you purchased an email list or they opted in with their email address.

Categorizing and Analyzing Online Visitors

The online lead management process starts at the source of prospects, and ends at the transfer of qualified opportunities to a Sales person. Somewhere in between these points you obtain a piece of the prospect’s contact information, perhaps a name and phone number or more likely just an email address. As a result they go from an anonymous web visitor to a suspect and the online dialogue begins.

The visitors to your website can be categorized into four groups:

• Registrants – Those for whom you have contact information
• Downloaders – Have downloaded a file from you but are still anonymous
• Window Shoppers – Browsed through 2 or more pages and left
• Bouncers – Arrived and left from the same page, and viewed no other

Your primary goal is likely to be to drive more registrants and thereby drive qualified opportunities into sales as a result of qualifying more registrants. In support of this goal you will probably engage in activities that drive more visitors, and activities that lead to conversion of more ‘downloaders’, window shoppers, and bouncers to registrants.

The First Date (Starting the online dialogue)

No doubt you have mechanisms in place to capture contact information from visitors. It is important to avoid creating hurdles to the start of the dialogue. Asking visitors to answer 10 or 20 questions in order to register for something is rather like demanding to see a blind date’s entire family medical history before dinner. Unlike the old selling process where the Sales Rep needed a lot of information to justify the first visit to the prospect, the start of the online dialogue only requires a single piece of contact information – a legitimate email address. You can ask your other questions gradually as the online dialogue progresses. The fewer questions you ask initially, the larger the quantity of people will opt in with a basic piece of contact information. As long as the low quality registrants can be cost-effectively filtered out before hand-off to a sales rep, focusing on quantity rather than quality at the entrance to your sales funnel is justified.

It is important to track the unique sources of the registrants, right down to the key words, referring websites, ads, or emails that caused them to click to a page on your website, and also what offer on your website they accepted in exchange for their contact information. Whether you use WebTrends, Omniture, or Google Analytics, all of these tools have the capabilities to give you remarkable insights to the start and progression of the online dialogue.


The Second Date (Making the next move)

Once you have established a basic contact with a prospect, what is the next step? There is no doubt that the onus is on the seller to make the next move! The best approach is to create educational tracks for the prospect. Recognizing that they are in the research phase of their buying cycle, and may not want to talk with a sales rep just yet, don’t rush to calling them unless they specifically request it. You might require different educational tracks based on product of interest, or market segment. A typical track for a prospect might look like this:

1. Browse the seller’s website

2. Download some product literature

3. Register to download a whitepaper

4. Register to view a pre-recorded webcast

5. Download a podcast

6. Register to participate in a webinar

7. Request further information via email to an ISR

8. Request a product trial or demo

9. Request a Sales Person contact them

In this example the dialogue starts in step 3, when the prospect offers up their contact information. The ‘second date’ is step 4. In step 3 the email response to the request for a whitepaper will carry the whitepaper (or a link to the whitepaper) and an invitation encouraging them to carry on to step 4. In addition the whitepapers used in step 3 will all have calls to action embedded in them, perhaps in the form of links to the step 4 webcast. The links in the email and in the whitepapers can all include unique tracking code so you will be able to measure exactly which and how many of the step 3 prospects followed your guidance to step 4 by clicking on the links and coming to your website again.

Keeping the Lines of Communication Open (The ongoing dialogue)

For the progression from step 4 onwards to the end of the track, you would use similar techniques to encourage the prospect to take the next step. At some junction, when it is deemed cost effective to engage an Inside Sales Representative (ISR), you may call the prospect to further encourage them. At each step you can ask for additional information, gradually gathering additional data to assist you in qualifying them, without ever creating a large hurdle to their progression down the track: full name, company name, telephone number, title, solution of interest, location, budget, timeframe for decision etc. Your website will offer a “remember me” function so that your prospects don’t have to re-enter any information for subsequent visits.

It is an old truism that people may enjoy buying but few like being sold. As a result sellers will benefit from positioning themselves as helpful research advisors rather than hard core sellers during the online dialogue. This is the period when the prospect is most likely in the research phase of their buying process. If possible, make the responses back to the prospect more personalized, establishing a link between them and a specific person in the ISR team. Offer the ISR’s time to help answer questions. Provide additional relevant advice and research beyond that to be found on your company’s website.

Lastly, experiment to see which tracks work best at moving the most prospects through the online dialogue fastest, and produce the best qualified opportunities. Don’t force prospects to move backwards in a track. Allow prospects to teach you what the best track looks like.


The Hand-Off to Sales

At Rubicon Marketing Group we have worked with clients that have online dialogues as short as a week, and as long as three years. With an effective lead scoring mechanism, agreed to by sales and marketing management, the time to end the marketing online dialogue with a prospect is precisely defined. At this point the dialogue should have provided all of the information required for a sales person to engage and move the opportunity along the sales funnel. The record of the online dialogue needs to be transferred to the Sales Force Automation system so that the Sales representative doesn’t waste their time nor the prospects time repeating steps that have already been taken.

Final Thoughts for Success

Shifting your initial interactions with prospects to online is only partly your choice. Many prospects have already shifted their buying process to engaging with you through online methods. How you respond to this change is critical to your success. The online dialogue is not a mirror image of the old selling process. It offers many advantages, including cost effectiveness, and measurability. Businesses that learn to engage early in the online dialogue with prospects will reap the benefits of healthier and more predictable sales pipelines.

For additional information, please visit www.rubiconway.com or contact Kevin at Kevin.joyce@rubiconway.com