This post is the third and final post in a series on Creating a Service Level Agreement between Marketing and Sales.

Previously in this series, I discussed the creation of an SLA that contains a definition of a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and a process for level of effort. In the final post on this topic, I wanted to show you how you bring this all together with reporting and what Brian Carrol refers to as Closed Loop Feedback.

As with any process change, proper tracking and reporting will let you know what needs improvement and what is not working. In the case of MQLs and level of effort, we have implemented a MQL dashboard at ReadyTalk, which tracks how many MQLs are accepted by sales, how many are won/lost and the average deal size. The most important of these is the MQL conversion rates in these areas. If a large percentage of MQLs are being rejected by sales, the MQL definition needs to be revisited and tweaked. Similarly, if a large percentage of MQLs are being accepted but the opportunity is not created, the MQL definition needs to be revisited. This is especially true in our model since all accepted MQLs should be made into working opportunities.

While the dashboard gives you a quantitative measure of how your new process is performing, the closed loop feedback system gives you a qualitative look at each lead. Brian defines this system on his blog. We have instituted weekly gatherings of pertinent parties for this closed loop feedback process. Each lead that has made it to MQL status is discussed. With direct feedback from the sales representative who owns the lead, we are able to fine-tune the process.

Any process change should be accompanied by metrics that can be used to judge the success of the new process. The MQL dashboard and closed loop feedback system are tools we use at ReadyTalk to help our sales team with more qualified leads. What are some of the processes you use? Did I miss anything?

Does your marketing department have a service-level agreement (SLA) with the sales department? Does marketing know the type of leads the sales team wants delivered?

We are currently revamping our lead hand-off process and nurture programs. As part of the process, I am having the sales team re-define what a qualified lead looks and feels like.

First, I made a distinction between a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) and a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). I believe this is important because marketing very rarely has a live conversation with a prospect. Rather, we collect information through forms, registration pages and other avenues. As a result, it is hard for us to collect Budget, Authority to buy, Need, Timeline for purchase (BANT), and related information on a form. Things like BANT are much better left to a phone discovery call. We may be able to collect one of those but the accuracy will be low.

For our purposes, we have defined a MQL as a lead that is ready for sales to call upon. We broke MQLs up into two different categories. The first category we loosely call “trigger events.” These are events and actions that a prospect could take that would immediately qualify them; a great deal of these trigger events revolve around BANT criteria. For example, if a prospect indicates they are ready to buy in the next one to six months, the sales team wants to engage the prospect with a phone call (we do some more sorting based upon number of employees as well on the back-end). Another example of a trigger event is if a prospect indicates they recently experienced pain with their current provider (conference failed, bad service, poor quality, lack of support).

The second category is a catchall for prospects that failed to meet a trigger event but based upon their profile and behavior warrant a call from a sales person. This is where the real conversations happen. What is the demographic profile of an MQL? What are their behavior patterns?

Our sales team is 15 people so we chose a subset of the 15 to participate in the MQL discussion to define this catchall category. After defining the MQL, the next step was to get affirmation from the entire sales team. Once completed, we need to define the level of effort that the sales team will put towards an MQL. I will discuss this in my next blog post. I would love to hear how you have defined qualified leads for your sales team and what your SLA process has been like. What roadblocks should I expect?

Web conferencing services have expanded their uses beyond simple collaboration. Many organizations are spending a great deal of money on conducting educational webinars, training videos and sales demonstrations. These conferences are often of high production value and with a hired speaker. It only makes sense to record this conference and re-purpose it for later.

If you are going to put all that money into creating a webinar, you should also think about how you are going to distribute the content and archive it after it is made. The demand for tools that allow you to easily record, publish and distribute conferencing recordings is increasing, as organizations do more produced webinars.

We have always led the industry in content distribution and recording. With our integrated audio and web platform for one-click recording and our industry first podcast ability and hosted RSS feed. We have supplied these things to our customers at no extra charge.

With Conference Center 4, we have re-done the ReadyTalk Media Player and have added several nice new features that add to the production value of your conference recordings.

Check out this short video of the ReadyTalk Media Player.

1. We have re-skinned the player and gave it an up-to-date look with embedded controls, a new thumbnail view and thumbnail previews. It also scales to fit in your browser to avoid scroll bars and clipping
2. You are now also able to embed your recordings into your website or social media site of your choice. This meets your audiences viewing expectations (think YouTube) and also allows viewers to stay on your site while they watch your content. No more annoying pop-ups to watch recordings

A guest post by Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal– providing local online advertising for professional service firms.

Did you know you can have a personalized high-converting soft-sales campaign that is completely automatic? That’s right—you can make money on auto pilot!

In this post we’ll show you how to reel the customer in with semi-personalized message and then upsell them over a period of time with auto responder messages.

Here’s how the system functions.

There are several types of content that can be used here to “soften up” the customer:

• eBooks (can be used to educated and sell, or sometimes can even be what is sold as the solution)
• Automated emails (usually the primary upsell method after the potential customer is sucked into the system through a landing page). These emails should seem personal and should be sent out at regular intervals. Some variations might have an additional “exclusive” email series as the sold solution.

Of course, the goal of these ebooks or emails is to do some light education around a thorny problem, then show how the product for sale is perfect solution to the problem just described.

Here’s the model for using this method spelled out. First, you need to establish pain, then you create rapport, after that move on to framing the issue. Now, you’re ready to provide the solution. This is completely different than the direct sales model of sell, sell, sell:

• Establish pain: People won’t buy unless they are in pain. At Blitz, we do this right from the start by showing how the prospect doesn’t show up in search results when people are actively looking for the very service they offer. Jealousy also plays into this, since they can see what competitors are doing. Some of the tools we are building appear to be rank checkers, but are really pain generation tools—they point out what is wrong with your site.
• Creating rapport: Rapport is a fancy way of saying identification and comfort being around you, which is a low level of trust. The casual, conversational tone and revealing of semi-personal details and emotions humanizes the seller. They still wield an iron fist, but it’s covered with a velvet glove. In other words, they’re still trying to sell you, but are doing it an apparently gentle way. People buy from their friends, people they like. Do you feel empathy for the seller while reading? Good—his techniques are working on you. Often times the email series or ebooks will be written from the first person and appear to be from the CEO himself, sent apparently from his own email address. It’s a nice personal touch, and one that is fairly easy to mimic (if you want to adopt this strategy for yourself).
• Framing the issue: When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The recent Borrell Research report on local framed the high churn issue among local resellers as one of insufficient PPC management software. Therefore, the solution is more PPC software, provided by Clickable, who just so happens to be the sponsor of the report (imagine that). A recent piece by a software company takes 30 pages to basically say one thing—that email autoresponders are the key to selling, since it’s automated, warms up the prospect over many touches, and allows them to respond when they are interested (not when you want to sell them). There, in one sentence and I’ve perhaps saved you 57 pages of reading. But look at how clever that formula is.
• Providing the solution: Now that he has you all worked up– you’ve intensely felt the pain of not having enough revenue, you identify with him as a friend, and he’s described the problem in a way most favorable to his solution– he mentions the answer. At first in passing and then more strongly as you get to the last few pages. Of course, he’s been talking about his product the whole time, you just didn’t realize how this trap was being set. He’s got you right where he wants you. And he didn’t have to spend a millisecond of his own personal time to get you there, the whole thing was automated. You perhaps watched a 2 minute video of him talking to you– like a good friend would chat with you. He’s been talking about your needs and you feel like you kind of know him. Time to buy!

And he, meaning the system, will continue to send out automated emails until you cry “mercy” and sign up for his software. Meanwhile, he’s sitting back, letting the automation software run, and the sales come rolling in.

But after reading through all the material, consider how you feel emotionally (I’d like to buy this software and I like this guy) versus what you’ve actually learned about what type of industry the product addresses (what specific steps and techniques can you implement?). If you’ve gone to a Baptist church, you may know what I’m talking about—call to action at the end, where people come up and confess. Probably not rationally-based, but one of emotion. The music is playing and you’re feeling spiritual. Ever seen “Leap of Faith”, the Steve Martin movie where he plays a huckster preacher, faith healer, caster outer of demons, and revenue generator extraordinaire under the big tent?

There really is little difference—think about it.

The “smarter” people think they are, the more easily they will fall for these sales techniques, since they’re thinking with the left side of their brain (rational), while really this system hammers them on the right side (emotional). This is how you can sell to anyone, no matter how “logical” they are.

A guest post by Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal– providing local online advertising for professional service firms.

If you’re a small business owner like me, you check up on the competition now and then. Look at the big guys. How many people do they have, how much do they spend on advertising, how much muscle can they flex compared to tiny little you?

Sometimes it’s daunting to be the small guy– maybe you have a single office and are competing against a national chain. They may have 20 people in their Internet marketing group and you are perhaps doing it part-time, among the 15 other things you’re trying to do. How can you compete?

Let me tell you a story…. The angel investor in our tiny company is Markus Frind. If you haven’t heard of Markus, a few years ago, he taught himself how to program by building a dating site. At the time, folks like Match.com and eHarmony were established players with millions of users. This ONE GUY built a website that is now larger than both of these players, generating over 2 billion pageviews a month, earns more than any other website on the planet on Google advertising, and is the #70 most popular site on the planet.

He did this all by himself. One guy. At Yahoo! Personals, I was proud to be part of a team of 80 folks. Match.com had well over 300 employees. The other publicly traded firms also have hundreds of employees. How did one guy beat industry giants with massive staff and marketing budgets to become the #1 most popular dating site on earth (verified by HitWise)?

• The race is not about big and small: It’s about fast versus slow. You as a small business are more nimble than the mega corporations. Do you remember your days suffering in the bowels of a giant company, tied up in bureaucracy, perhaps hating your job? Now you’re the nimble guy who can make decisions and just go, as opposed to having multiple committees and PowerPoints to discuss who should be at the meeting to make a decision.
• Many people slow things down: Ever done a 3-legged sack race at a carnival? If two legs are good, three legs are better, right? If you’re the one person doing the Internet marketing for your company, you don’t have to worry about a ton of coordination. With bureaucracy, things get mis-communicated and lost. Back to the dating example, Markus was the Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Technology Officer, and so forth. He could make decisions immediately with no paperwork.
• You have a better view: When you serve multiple roles, you see things that folks who are splintered into many functions wouldn’t realize. In a big company, Marketing can’t get stuff done because IT has set up things for their benefit, not that of Marketing. If that technical person understood marketing, maybe they would have set things up another way.
• The buck stops with you: It’s your money– and, therefore, you care more than a corporate drone ever would. You’re not a wage slave who is disgruntled or trying to skate by unnoticed. You are motivated to succeed.

The fact that you’re reading this says that you are actively looking for ways to improve your business.

So take heart in knowing that small is an advantage. The race is won by the fastest, not the biggest. You can seize on new marketing techniques and optimize several times before the behemoths are even aware such techniques exist. Be the David killing the Goliath– or for you history buffs, Sir Francis Drake versus the Spanish Armada: little ships that outmaneuvering the big battle ships.