Author: David Svigel
Buyer behavior has changed; contact with your prospects occurs later in the sales cycle, and your leads come armed with more information than ever before about your products and services.
What does this mean for marketing? It’s up to you to create and guide the conversation throughout the customer lifecycle. Thankfully, you can prepare for this by leveraging tools that sell value, rather than features, to increase lead quality and sales velocity. With the right solutions, you can integrate value selling tools on each channel of your multi-channel marketing environment–on landing pages and forms, in marketing programs, and throughout marketing activities.
In this blog, I’ll explain how you can use value selling tools in conjunction with your digital marketing platform to enhance the buyer’s journey and ultimately grow your revenue:
Build Awareness at the Top of the Funnel
Most people search for a solution before they’ve identified the size of their problem. However, if your prospects don’t know the true scope of their problem, anything they try is unlikely to resolve the underlying issue. This is like putting out the sparks of a conflagration instead of dousing the main fire.
Putting the cart before the horse is always a time-wasting effort, so help your prospects turn it around with an assessment tool. An assessment tool helps your prospects define their business problem and shows how they measure up to industry benchmarks and best practices. By requiring leads to fill out a form to obtain the results of their assessment, you can capture their valuable information in your marketing database.
Assessment tool: identify gaps in performance
By its very nature, an assessment tool captures more detailed information than a typical content download, allowing you to further segment your leads and nurture them with highly relevant and personalized content. And by scoring leads and accounts in your marketing platform, you can determine their sales-readiness and prioritize high-quality leads.
Get Conversions to the Middle of the Funnel
At the middle of the funnel, your prospects have the right demographics and behavior, have engaged with you, and have displayed buying intent. They’re potential sales leads, but may need a little nudge.
A value calculator shows prospects how much money they’re losing by working around their pain points instead of resolving them, so they’ll be more likely to evaluate your solution. It’s often a bridge between the top and middle of the sales funnel and provides the foundation for a solid business case.
Value calculator: highlight the value of solving the problem
At the same time, the data you collect from your lead’s inputs can help you build out a more in-depth customer record in your marketing database. Integrating a value calculator with your marketing platform saves you time and eliminates errors by reducing manual data entry. Your sales team can also access all the information prospects enter into the value calculator, either through your CRM platform or digital marketing platform, which allows them to have more meaningful conversations with them right away.
Closing the Deal at the Bottom of the Funnel
As leads move from the middle to the bottom of the funnel, they’re close to becoming customers.
A Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) tool allows them to compare your product with a competitor’s. If leads are evaluating multiple solutions, a TCO tool can validate your solution as the best choice. It also benefits your organization, feeding valuable information into your marketing database and providing direction for sales as they follow up.
TCO tool: compare against the competition
Another powerful motivator towards closing the deal is a return on investment (ROI) tool, which shows your prospects how quickly their investment will pay off. The results from an ROI tool justify the price of your solution and short-circuit requests for discounts. The financial metrics from an ROI tool can be used to convince their buying committee or finance team that your solution deserves an immediate slice of their budget.
ROI tool: calculate the ROI and break-even
Bringing It All Together
With a digital marketing platform that integrates with your value selling tools, your marketing data can be synced to create a detailed view of your buyers for use across the organization. This data automatically feeds into your marketing campaigns, and the increase in operational efficiency saves you time and money while automation grows your revenues faster.
By integrating value selling tools at each stage of the sales funnel, you can obtain highly specific data to refine your marketing. In addition, value selling tools provide real benefits to your prospects, allowing them to understand how your solution can help them succeed. Buyers will have all the information needed to make a quick and knowledgeable decision, shortening your sales cycle and increasing your closing ratios.
What other value selling tools have you used in your organization? Share in the comments below.
4 Value Selling Tools to Move Leads Down the Funnel was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com
The post 4 Value Selling Tools to Move Leads Down the Funnel appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.
from Marketo Marketing Blog http://blog.marketo.com/2017/02/4-value-selling-tools-to-move-leads-down-the-funnel.html
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